I say “Haven’t you seen the world?
My anger is right where it needs to be.”
and
An Inheritance, A Chance
is not money or land,
but a way of closing a paperback book
of shoving my hands into my pockets in a crowd
of craning my neck
of staring off heaven’s better mousetrap
and hoping it works
Wisdom’s Real Opposite—101 Poems about an Odyssey on a Stool consists of ten years of poems written in and about bars. They observe impossible hopes colliding with shabby realities in both starkly lucid and deeply distorted moments. They’re funny poems that avoid being a comedy routine; severe and extreme poems that nonetheless maintain sympathy and humanity. Taken together, they represent what the best of books promise—something better than drinking alone.
Poems in this, and the other three volumes in this series, have appeared in more than a hundred eighty publications, and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. The poet and songwriter David Berman (Silver Jews, Actual Air) said of them: “These are very good poems. For moments I could even feel the old feelings when I read them.”
It is available for pre-order on Amazon and Smashwords.
Colin Dodds grew up in Massachusetts and completed his education in New York City. He’s the author of several novels, including The Last Bad Job, which the late Norman Mailer touted as showing “something that very few writers have; a species of inner talent that owes very little to other people.” His screenplay, Refreshment – A Tragedy, was named a semi-finalist in 2010 American Zoetrope Contest.
