Critical Commentary
STEEL VALLEY is Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River Anthology on steroids, mega-steroids, moved forward into the 21st century with all the love and pain and remorseless human dignity in the face of our crumbling institutions you can ever imagine….. His form is organic: the shifting meter, tempo, and tone of the lines match the mindset of the shifting moments of our lives rather than fitting one stale archaic French form or another. His nonlinear leaps from stanza to stanza and poem to poem are as fine as those of Bly. And he writes about women with a direct matter-of-fact tone that matches Bukowski when Buk wasn’t in his cups or feeling sorry for himself.
Jared Smith, author of Grassroots [Wind Publications, 2010] and The Graves Grow Bigger Between Generations [Higganum Hill Books,2007]
A bittersweet elegy to a by-gone time, of stepping “into the fires in the cathedral shadows of the furnaces, /…Pittsburgh where I was tested and tempered,” Michael Adamsrecords in the clipped language of his native Monongahela Valley a world of friends and family living through a turbulent transformation from “our city / beautiful / molten / riven to the core” to “boarded up storefronts, abandoned downtowns, suicides and divorces, low wage jobs or no jobs at all.”
Like Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl talking blues, William Carlos Williams’ Paterson and Jack Keruoac’s bop prosody road novels, form meets content in Steel Valley as compliments, not opposites, to celebrate an original voice, a new way to cohere the gestalt. In the Introduction John Macker calls “these tough, tender-eyed poems and prose pieces at once blue collar and bohemian,”
Kirpal Gordon, author of Ghost & Ganga: A Jazz Odyssey [Leaping Dog Press, 2010]
His is a voice of passion, fierce truth and compassion for all beings. If you’re lucky, you’ll get to hear him read in that prophetic, incantatory style of a Homer or a Ginsberg.
But whether you experience these pieces in person or in print, have a listen.
Art Goodtimes, introduction to Steel Valley
