Bobcat Country
A glimpse of the titles in this book—“My Mother Can’t Stand This Poem,” “Why I Hate Ian Harris,” “Reality TV Has Ruined My Childhood”—hints at the energy, sass, and verve we find here in this freshly observed world. Displaying an admirable range, Brandi Homan offers us both the haunting prose poem sequence, “Recurring Dream House,” and the seemingly casual, at times caustic, observations of a “Drugstore Cowgirl.” Homan excels at the telling detail; Bobcat Country opens and closes with poems deeply rooted in the 1980s Midwest. This texture provides welcome humor in a bleak landscape as we follow the exploits of troubled teenage girls wearing “blue Wet-n-Wild nail polish” who drink “Zima through licorice straws.” The accomplishment of this book is that through careful observation and precise, painterly detail, Homan does more than capture one time, one place—she gives us a deeply felt, reverberating world.
—Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Unmentionables, W. W. Norton
How can a line of language be so directed and searing and still entertain the messy feast of the bleary eyed ever-birthing world? Brandi Homan’s work wakes the nervous system and embodies the difficult beauty and complexity of the question. Lucky readers, lucky us.
—Selah Saterstrom, author of The Meat and Spirit Plan, Coffee House Press
Brandi Homan’s Bobcat Country is the unholy love child of Lynda Barry and Ween. Fabulously honest, surprising, and hilarious, these poems are a TGIFriday’s extravaganza of retarded American enthusiasm, deftly rendered. Homan loves the “Fuck yeaaaah!”s our culture hoots just before it drives its rental car off a cliff. Her details are so spot on, their mere presence relieves us of the need for contrived, “poetic” resolutions. That’s what makes the poems true—there are no easy answers in them. They make me proud to be a woman, and yet, simultaneously, wanna sincerely rock out in a parking lot to rape rock.
—Jennifer L. Knox, author of Drunk by Noon and A Gringo Like Me, Bloof Books