The Romance of Happy Workers - Anne Boyer

AN EXCITING NEW AMERICAN POET HARVESTS FIELDS OF SOUND FROM THE SEEDS OF HER BUCOLIC VOCABULARY. n nn nThe Romance of Happy Workers swaggers through a world of cowboys, conquistadors, comrades, and housewives with mock-Russian lyric sequences and Keatsian swoon. Political and iconoclastic, Anne Boyer's poems dally in pastoral camp and a dizzying, delightful array of sights and sounds born from the dust of the Kansas plains where dinner for two is cooked in Fire King and served on depression ware, and where bawdy instructions for a modern Home on the Range read: n n nn nMix a drink of stock lot: n nvermouth and the water table.n nAnd the bar will smell of IBP.n nAnd you will lick my Laura Ingalls.n n nn nIn Boyer's heartland, Surfaces should be worn.

Lamps should smolder. / Dahlias do bloom like tumors. The birds do rise like bombs.

And the once bright and now crumbling populism of Marxists, poets, and folksingers springs vividly back to life as realism, idealism, and nostalgia do battle amongst the silos and ditchweed.n