Winter 2009
Issue 4
Enjoy the online version of James Tyner’s The Ghetto Exorcist, winner of the 2008 Coal Hill Review Chapbook Prize.
“I was struck first by the ways this poet built his poems from the detritus of contemporary life: Cheetos, Hollywood trash, Vaseline. As I read closer, though, I discovered it was not the things, but the people he meant to hold up to the light. In nearly every poem you’ll find images of the body and the blood, the abusers and abused, the loveless and loved. These poems live in the space between violence and tenderness, elegy and praise. Words like grit and vigor suit this work, but the best word for what we are given and witness to is passion.”
–Terrance Hayes