Mystery of the Hidden Driveway

MYSTERY OF THE HIDDEN DRIVEWAY
Jennifer L. Knox

$15.00

“Knox’s characteristic dark humor is counterbalanced not so much by moments of lyric seriousness as by the work’s energy and intensity: Knox not only probes the wrecks and recklessness of a speaker’s personal past—most notably, in a literal and drug-induced series of car accidents in the prose-poem sequence ‘Cars’— but also turns her sharp eye and sharper ear on the collective wreck of contemporary culture and its distortions of appetite and desire. And although the book is a wild ride, the feeling of being out-of-control is purely illusory; this is, rather, a carefully and artfully designed tour, one fueled by the joint energies of guilt and violence and of the poet’s gift for the propulsive sentence, the tight and resonant line.” —Publishers Weekly

“All you need is the ability to detect the madness of the present. Knox’s writing will always be contemporary, because there will always be a past.” —Raymond McDaniel, Constant Critic

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Description

December 2010
Trade Paper Original
ISBN: 978-0-9826587-1-0
84 pp. | $15.00

In The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway, Jennifer L. Knox expands on her inimitable cast of characters, in hilariously poignant poems. In poems like “Marriage” and “One Ton of Dirt,” Knox ventures further into autobiographical territory than she’s ever gone before, in ways that will startle those familiar with her previous books, exploring relationships with her exes, her parents, and her younger self.

Like the best comedians (to whom she’s often compared), Knox is never merely funny. Each of her speakers, even the bedraggled coyote that walks into a Quizno’s, has something important to say.

Bob Hicock describes the effect of her trademark dark humor perfectly when he says, “The oddities of her work create a space in which it’s possible to be oddly sincere. Knox is asking what really matters, in poems that move powerfully toward an answer.”

Cover painting by Charles Browning.

Additional information

Author

Knox, Jennifer L.

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