Bum Town
In a gruffly lyrical remembrance of his late father, Fitzpatrick, an artist as well as a poet, cruises the scruffy streets of Chicago's South Side. "Muscle of light," the first line in the first poem, conveys the vibrant physicality of both his writing and his visual art. His terse and rhythmic poems are paced to streetlights and potholes and the teasing conversation of his father's ghost as he pilots his Oldsmobile through the flat-out ugly city where romance blooms as stubbornly as wildflowers in asphalt, and sorrow pools in every corner. Fitzpatrick's flinty yet sensual terrain is built with stockyard blood, factory sweat, rain-glistened iron, baseball cheers, guzzled beer, climbing smoke, "used cars and short skirts," the tawdry and the poignant, the weak and the heroic. And his drawings and etchings--as densely graphic and pulp-mysterious as tabloid pages or handmade posters slapped on abandoned buildings--ride the tracks of his bluesy poems like train cars in the night.Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved