Overdrive (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781952204135)

OVERDRIVE engages multiple forms of verse, as well as letter-poems, monologues, elegies, and quasi-fictional notes from dreams and therapy. Other-voice speakers range from the historical, through the mythic, to fireproof masks invented by the author. It blows a few stoplights on its road-trip of the psyche--from tumult towards recovery--as the speaker (and his varied personae) seek an elusive ideal. A sense of loss, so strong it fragments the self, has driven him inward; there, the voices of others help him find his own. Their oblique by-ways hint at some central, perhaps supernal, destination; and he gains power enough to run a second jagged track of exploration and amour. With despair internalized almost as hope, he can at last head for home--a place metaphoric but real as dirt.

Mac Miller, where have you been? Everywhere, it seems. Like you, your poems are hard to pin down: they remind me of Dylan's songs and Kerouac's novels in the way they're always looking out toward the horizon. Even the poems that are set in one place don? seem as though they?l stay there long. Mac, you've got your foot on the pedal and one sunburned arm out the window, and that's me riding shotgun. Put it in gear, son--America is a country that's always waiting to be discovered, and your poems are dying to take us there.--David Kirby

Poetry.