Rowing Inland by Jim Daniels

Rowing Inland Reviews

• 
  Jenny (Reading Envy)

  These poems are very place-based, from Jim Daniels' childhood up through experiences as a teen and adult, in a Detroit already headed toward obliteration. Imagine Eminem's uncle, living a few streets up from 8 Mile, his parents hard-working factory workers, and that seems about right.
  
  As I was going through the collection, I found something to like on almost every page. So here are some of the top highlights:
  
  Welcome to Warren
  III. Hidden Beauty
  9.
  "This won't hurt. It'll just
  kill you. On this church
  I shall build my rock.
  Upsidedownville is conducting
  a recount, demanding the beer
  and the chair, offering only
  the Elusive Smirk in exchange...."
  
  And how's this for a childhood:
  Welcome to Warren
  VI. The End of Childhood
  "The gentle stench of poisoned weeds
  the absence of stately trees, adult supervision
  wide, flat factories
  and the chemical tar of their parking lots.
  Gearless bicycles and greasy rags
  and rolled-up T-shirts, the foreign tenderness
  of girls we shied away from, then dreamt about...."
  
  Crayola Trailer Park Eight-Pack
  "....Prayer: subtle opaque blue murmur.
  Creates mirages. Erases as it goes."
  
  Quitting the Day Job in the Middle Ages
  "...Here in the Rust Belt of the Flyover States
  
  I fill out my forms, press hard
  on my memorized numbers.
  
  That sound you hear is either
  the sound of the drain sucking down
  
  the last bit of moisture
  or milk telling lies to my cereal."
  
  You can see the poet read from this collection
  on YouTube.
  
  (Thanks to the publisher for sending an eGalley through Edelweiss, which I saved for National Poetry Month.)
  
• 
  Sean Kottke

  This poetry collection has the bare-knuckled autobiographical feel of Bukowski transplanted to Warren, Michigan, with a disciplined subtlety muting some of the late L.A. poet's deliberate artlessness. There are a few opaque verses here, but on the whole, a visceral sense of place and a meta-narrative tying together the lives of the poems' working-class subjects emerges indelibly.
• 
  Gerry LaFemina

  Probably this book is one good edit from being a great book--it's a bit long, some of the poems a bit loose in a talky kind of way, but when Daniels is at the top of his game (as he is often) his poems are simple, eloquent, unassumming, unpretentious, and memorable.
• 
  Sandy D.

  Dark, coarse, and powerful poems about coming of age in Detroit, and aging in Warren (a blue collar suburb), from a decidedly male perspective. Family, dead-end jobs, poverty, accidents, and city streets and neighborhoods.
• 
  Timons Esaias

  I am a long-time admirer of Jim Daniels's work, prose and poetry, and was happy to hear the familiar voice in "Customs" (the prose-poemy frontispiece piece) and "Wishbone" and many of the poems in the first two-thirds of this collection. Most of the poems are looking back to early years in Detroit, with clear images, direct narrations, and they throw solid punches. I was especially happy, because I recently went through his other collection from 2017, which put me off. Those poems were as skilled as always, but gave me a strong phony-as-a-three-dollar-bill vibe, that I can't entirely explain.
  
  The poems closer to the end of this one started running in that same direction, so I had a mixed reaction to the book as a whole. Poets, however, are allowed to change, and maybe I'm just not ready to follow what seems to be a new direction of some sort. Hmmm.
  
  I'd still check out this book, though. It has great strength. (But maybe leave Street Calligraphy on the shelf.)
  
  Best snide line: "If memory were a contest, the liars would win." (from "Welcome to Warren")