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Finalist, 2022 Miller Williams Poetry PrizeIn a voice at times
electrified by caustic cynicism, at other times stripped bare by
grief, Casey Thayer's Rational Anthem offers wry tribute to "the
greatest country God could craft with the mules he had / on hand."
In seeking to tell the story of the ragged world around him, Thayer
examines the links among flag-waving populism, religious fervor,
and toxic masculinity. Here male intimacy-among childhood friends,
between father and son, and in the tenuous bonds between young
adults-generally finds acceptance only when expressed through a
shared passion for guns and hunting: "I helped my father clean his
hands with field grass, / convinced we had shared a moment / in
rolling the internal organs out of the abdomen." In "How-To," the
book's closer-a mash-up of instructions from active-shooter
trainings attended by the poet-Thayer grasps at strategies for
surviving a world where we have come to see school shootings as
routine: "Grab a textbook, they instructed my child, and hug it to
your chest over your heart." Formally deft and lyrically dense,
Rational Anthem asks why we find it so hard to change the stories
we keep repeating.
Part fun-house hall of mirrors in its distorted and dizzying
central narrative, part spaghetti western, and part prayer,
Self-Portrait with Spurs and Sulfur is an exploration into the
possibilities of storytelling. Through persona poems and odes, the
collection argues that the muddier the narrative, the closer the
story gets to truth.
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