Rowing Inland

by Jim Daniels

Overview

Charts the emotional, political, and economic landscapes of the working-class Metro Detroit community and its residents.

Rowing Inland, Jim Daniels's fifteenth book of poetry is a time machine that takes the reader back to the Metro Detroit of his youth and then accelerates toward the future. With humor and empathy, the author looks at his own family's challenges and those of the surrounding community where the legacy handed down from generation to generation is one of survival. The economic hits that this community has to endure create both an uncertainty about its future and a determined tenacity.

Divided into four sections, Rowing Inland calls out key moments from the author's life. The events that inspire many of these poems took place a long time ago and often it has taken the poet his entire life to write about those experiences and write about them with the necessary emotional distance. For example, some of the poems in the section "Late Invocation for Magic" reference the first girl he ever kissed and her accidental death by fire. In the last section of the book, Daniels approaches the current political and social standings in Detroit with lines like, "The distance to Baghdad or Kandahar / is measured in rowboat coffins / while here in the fatty palm of The Mitten / minor skirmishes electrify tedium." Although it focuses on Detroit's metropolitan area, the book can be considered a snapshot of working-class life anywhere across the country. Daniels casts his lens on a way of life that is often distorted or ignored by the powers that be. He zooms in on street level where all the houses may look alike but each holds its own secrets and dreams.

To paraphrase novelist and screenwriter Richard Price, Detroit is the "zip code for [Daniels's] heart"—a place that his writing will always come back to. Readers of contemporary poetry with a regional persuasion will enjoy this collection.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814342190
Publisher:	Wayne State University Press
Publication date:	02/06/2017
Series:	Made in Michigan Writers Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	136
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Jim Daniels’s recent books include Apology to the Moon, Birth Marks, and Eight Mile High (stories). He is also the writer/producer of a number of short films, including The End of Blessings. Born in Detroit, Daniels is the Thomas Stockham Baker University Professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xi

Customs xiii

1 Rowing Inland

Home Improvement 3

Rowing Inland 5

Swiss Steak 9

Wishbone 11

Talking by the Fence 12

Three Sonnets: Cutting My Grandfather's Grass 14

Beware of (My Grandfather's Fake) Dog 16

Prayer Above the Washer 17

My Mother Recalls the Miracle of the Loaf (No Fish) 18

Photo of My Grandparents Working Their Lunch Wagon at the Gates of Dodge Main 20

Family Relics: The Suicide Policeman's Blackjack 21

Second Shift Closed the Bar 24

Reading Dante's Inferno on Break at Ford's 26

Laughing from Here 27

Room Divider 28

Hard Candy 29

Last Meals 31

2 Welcome to Warren

Welcome to Warren

I The Exploding Cigar Tour 35

II Around the Block 37

III Hidden Beauty 40

IV Legendary Parks 45

V The Heavy Stuff 48

VI The End of Childhood 51

3 Late Invocation for Magic

Late Invocation for Magic 55

Weeding Out the Weak 59

Letter to Andy 60

The Monkees, 1968 64

"School's Out," Alice Cooper, 1972 66

Infamous 68

The Unpregnant Pause 70

Calling Out Marlene Miller 73

Dead Girl 75

Homemade Prom Dress 75

FOE: Forwarding Order Expired 79

4 Economic Fairy Tale

Soft Side of the Moon 87

Painting a Picture with Broken Crayons 90

Crayola Trailer Park Eight-Pack 91

The St. Vitus Dance of the Factory Floor 92

Rouge Overpass 94

Easter Sunday at Hakim's Convenience 95

Something Like a Sonnet for Something Like Peace 97

July 20 Fireworks During Ongoing Conflicts Abroad 98

Quitting the Day Job in the Middle Age? 102

A Game Called Rock 104

Christmas Dinner, 2008 105

Economic Fairy Tale: The Cement House 106

Fifth of July: The Morning After with Lady Liberty 107

Summer Weight, Labor Day 109

Crooked Teeth 111

Homeless Arisen from Dead 113

What People are Saying About This

Todd Davis of Winterkill and in the Kingdom of the Ditch

Rowing Inland is on par with Daniels's best work, and I would argue many of the most exceptional poems in this book suggest a push forward into more intimate and personal regions of exploration that will make an indelible impression upon his readers.

Editorial Reviews

The poet Jim Daniels claims that "If you look at anything long and hard enough, / it catches fire." His fine new poetry collection is the magnifying glass he uses to recover the details too often overlooked or forgotten, his "heart thick with grief's metal-flake." And just like a magnifying glass, these poems sometimes catch the light of the sun and the reader can feel the book almost burning in his hands.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - Kristofer Collins

[. . .] throughout Rowing Inland [. . .] Daniels [. . .] craft[s] the sometimes-mundane into something notable.

Pittsburgh City Paper - Fred Shaw

Jim’s wonderful sense of humor and simple human grace shine through in this new collection. Check it out.

Our Daily Work/Our Daily Lives - John Beck

With scarcely a wasted word, the speaker's examination of his past is excruciatingly objective and pitiless. I value these poems for their precision and honesty, and I appreciate Daniels’s wit, dryness of tone, and penchant for the surreal.

2013 Kresge literary fellow - Terry Blackhawk

These are glandular poems, then universal, because Daniels is an American Standard for all who grew up in cement cities, but also striking out for everyone who’s watched family as part of cultural change.

Washington Independent Review of Books - Grace Cavalieri

Dipped in acetate, these poems strip Detroit of any pretense and offer a flawless lesson in descriptive concision. But Rowing Inland delights because of Jim Daniels’s storytelling skills—a chronicle of incidents and anecdotes perfectly suited to poetic form.

Matt Sutherland

Rowing Inland is on par with Daniels's best work, and I would argue many of the most exceptional poems in this book suggest a push forward into more intimate and personal regions of exploration that will make an indelible impression upon his readers.

author of Winterkill and In the Kingdom of the Ditch - Todd Davis