Description Picture reversing a rodeo: the rider flies back onto the horse, the horse bucks into stillness.
A whirling cast of characters engage in self-interrogation and self-discovery and wrestle in similar fashion in the pages of Rodeo in Reverse, a debut collection from Lindsey Alexander, which Sean Hill calls the genuine article.
Both time machine and microscope, Rodeo in Reverse is woven from bits of Americana: married life, art history, pioneers, and witches.
These poems effortlessly traverse personal and historical pasts with tenderness and unrivaled humor.
They offer a tour of American landscape--the trees with bitter crop of the South; the plains of the Midwest; the duels of a cartoonish Wild West.
At once a wily romp and a lyric sweep, Rodeo in Reverse considers the possibilities and failures of domestic life on the never-ending quest of rounding up, and defining, the self.
Rodeo in Reverse is the winner of the 2017 New Southern Voices Poetry Prize.
About the Author Lindsey D.
Alexander is a Kentuckian who lives in East Tennessee with her dog and husband.
She was named after a 1970s TV star and a broadcast journalist.
She holds degrees from Indiana University and Purdue University.
Her poems have appeared on Poets.
org, and in Crazyhorse, Waxwing, The Southern Review, GRIST, and other publications.
A poem she wrote won the 2015 Devil's Lake Driftless Prize, and in 2014, she was a scholar at the month-long National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute Reconsidering Flannery O'Connor.
For more, visit LDAlexander.
