Late Alabama Poems

Joel Fry's poems chart a deeply interior quest. Though the object is predictable-understanding love friendship hope-the poems are highly original. Deep within where external and internal landscape merge where easy solutions like monetary success and comfortable suburbia go down before a sharp irony we meet fleeting memories of a childhood farm a creek beside which boys played rare moments of love where a couple sits on a porch. We also meet loneliness despair glimpses of truth and a pervasive joy in the act of creation. The poems are disciplined intuitive paradoxical richly imagined-repaying over and over the attention and agility required of those who would follow the poet. Fry leaves us poised on the edge of a mystery / [we] cannot command a chorus [we] cannot escape. Harry Moore author of Time's Fool and Bearing the Farm Away