wine for a shotgun
To read McConnell s Wine for a Shotgun is to be thrust into a world of ever-shifting landscapes and changing identities. An out-of-tune piano is a metaphor for infidelity each off-key note another night in the wrong person s bed and benign domestic objects become ominously alive right before a house crumbles. ... In the universe of Wine for a Shotgun, rescue is through the body and its music. ... Wine for a Shotgun is a book of transformation, but not just for McConnell s speakers. To read these poems is to be transformed from who or what you are to how you move through them, even if only for the time it takes to read the collection. --Muzzle Magazine by Jacob VictorineI love the unraveling of the poem, the conceit of telling the reader that there are seven kinds of loneliness and then taking five stanzas to delineate the first kind in the list, setting up the other seven as surprises tucked into tight bundles of language, each opening to reveal something new. The surprising takes on domestic images ( the shoes panting in the closet and a kitchen where the overhead light/sighs into a dim, the spoons tuck/their worn faces away ) are most welcome, and the compassion for the lost characters who populate the day (the man who stares at the schoolgirl on the train, the local crackhead, the men who circle the unemployment office) is evident. But the speaker also has compassion for herself, reminding all of us that we have time for mistakes even after listing some of her own perceived failings. There is music here and surprise and tenderness and despair in other words, there is life. --Poetry Mixtape