This Onion Snow - John Reid Currie

John Reid Currie's This Onion Snow is a melodic and inviting exploration of

the universal themes of place, loss, and the passage of time. Currie's poetry

wraps around its subjects like an illuminating cloak, and we see into a

mother's memory loss or the fingered structure of a bat wing. Currie evokes

sometimes-muddy landscapes with deeply felt portraits that range from

humorous to the maddening. Some lines sing like elegies: "this beauty we

give ourselves." This Onion Snow is a vivid and intimate collection, one that

gives readers a felt sense of our fluctuating relationship with place and time.

 

--Cynthia Yoder, Author, Crazy Quilt: Pieces of a Mennonite Life

Bumming Smokes

Andy’s one of those tanned hicks Catholic boys 

from Newark say will invite you over his house

sweet talk your Mom acting like that coy

thing, next second, you’re sleeping over; it stinks 

under the stars out near the barn; tomorrow

you’re in black wellingtons that don’t fit

and on your feet, white socks. This was common. 

You have to seek out, you know, common things.

Andy wants to walk in manure knee high.

Help him do his farm chores. Tend horses.

Spread out swill for piglets and soup. 

Andy points that .22 so the young colt rides up

on your trailer thinking you’re the source, bums

smokes from your old man, Andy points that .22