Jar of Pennies

"Sean Karns will break your heart. The narrator of this collection makes starkly vivid the hardscrabble background of his life: an unhappy mother who works at the slaughterhouse, a father whose farm fails, a boy who loves both but plays the piano to escape. A group of poems referencing the likes of Walker Evans and James Agee enlarges the context considerably. There is a doomed affair, a brilliant dream sequence about the father, and a field of "cornstalks...flutter[ing] their death rattle." Deeply sad, profoundly moving, and seductively musical, these poems are a testament to survival and art." - KELLY CHERRY, author of The Life and Death of Poetry: Poems