Drinking Guinness with the Dead - Justin Hamm

nTo find the poetic landscape of Justin Hamm you need to Look off in the direction the weathervane points, past the place where rain raps sideways against the silo, and suddenly you will find yourself inside the intricate ventricles of the human heart. What a tough beautiful little book of poems and photographs [The Inheritance] is-with sublime echoes of Richard Hugo: distant houses, fallowed fields, poems of work and love, signaling the arrival of Hamm as our new clear-eyed and sublime voice of the Midwestn n nn - Sean Thomas Dougherty, author of The Second O of Sorrow nn n nn . .

. some of most authentic poetry you will ever read. .

. [Hamm's] imagery tugs the reader into dreamscapes that reflect, with humor and love, the cultural and actual landscapes of the Midwest. nn n nn - The Columbia Daily Tribune nn nn Not just any blues-but that 'certain kind of blues music' Dylan refers to in liner notes for The Basement Tapes, where you 'can sit down and play it...you may have to lean forward a little.' And Hamm does just that, leans-'battered house Martin' in hand-camera in hand too-for this book includes a resonant counterpoint of black and white photographs that illuminate and extend the rust in these landscapes and their evaporating edges.

These fine poems and photos are portraits 'framed in barnwood'-of willing ghosts and of a poet willing to thread his voice with theirs before that 'big dark leap into the empty'. nn n nn Dennis Hinrichsen, author of Skin Music nn n nn