Description: "These poems are about two lives, a love story told in verse"--
Brief description: Kenneth Pobo is the author of twenty-one chapbooks and nine full-length collections. Recent books include Bend of Quiet (Blue Light Press), Loplop in a Red City (Circling Rivers), Dindi Expecting Snow (Duck Lake Books), Wingbuds (cyberwit.net), and Uneven Steven (Assure Press). Opening is forthcoming from Rectos Y Versos Editions.Human rights issues, especially as they relate to the LGBTQIA+ community, are a constant presence in his work. In addition to poetry, he writes fiction and essays. For the past thirty-plus years he taught at Widener University. He retired in 2020.
Review Quotes:
The two men at the center of this book (Jerry and Jeff) are both extraordinary and ordinary, and the poems chart their lives carefully, in great detail, with a loving gaze. The books lets us get to know them, as if they are dear friends, and the writing sparkles, written by someone with clear eyes, clear head, and a clear heart. This book will endear you to it too.
-Kevin Rabas, Poet Laureate of Kansas, 2017-2019, More Than Words
I've been a fan of Ken Pobo's poetry for a long, long time, but in Lilac and Sawdust Pobo has outdone himself. I've admired his horticultural poetry, but to paraphrase Keats: landscape is fine, but human nature, finer. We follow Jeff and Jerry through their growing up gay and getting dissed for it, to their finding each other, falling in gentle love, having to deal with censorious, even hateful and sometimes violently bigoted neighbors, with each other's bad moods, arguments, disagreements: to, in the final poem, sitting quietly together at 10:45 PM, in a good silence. This is a marvelous poetry collection, one to savor with lines that are beautiful and true and just terrific poetry.
-Bob Cooperman, author of Reefer Madness and The Ghosts and Bones of Troy