Description: Cold Blue Steel contains 50 lyric poems set in the world of the urban street cop in Houston, the nation's fourth largest metropolis. In the patrol car, at scenes of suicides and DOAs, in the overtime reality of aching feet and sweating torsos, the reader experiences the hard realities and unexpected luminosities of doing America's most dangerous job.
Review Quotes: "While Sarah Cortez's Cold Blue Steel gives a fascinating insider's view of police work rarely seen in poetry, it should not obscure the fact that she is simply a wonderful, talented poet. Period. These direct, hard-hitting poems sometimes had me laughing out loud, but I needed to sock away those laughs to balance the other poems that broke my heart. Cortez takes a poet's eye into the workplace and, like any good poet, uncovers what's really going on beneath the surface. These poems sing packed, tight songs--everything earned, nothing extra." --Jim Daniels, author of Show and Tell: New and Selected Poems, and other books