Something Burned Along the Southern Border

Robert Earl Stewart

ISBN 13: 978-1-894469-44-9

$16.95 CDN
128 pp

The poems in Robert Earl Stewart’s debut collection, Something Burned Along the Southern Border, are both thoughtful and audacious. They have something to say about coyotes that go on a crime spree in the city, about how Detroit looks from across the river on a hazy day, about carnivorous insects holding clandestine bake sales, about a lonely man chopping a pineapple at dusk. They blur the line between the surreal and the everyday, reminding us that there is always something extraordinary in our ordinary lives, and if we can only learn to recognize it, we can revel in it.

“With Wildean wit, Falstaffian amusements, and Hefnerian lust, these poems crackle with explosive language and arresting imagery. Something Burned Along the Southern Border heralds the arrival of a poet with gifts to delight and amaze.”
—Paul Vermeersch, author of The Fat Kid and Between the Walls

“Psalm-like and surreal, diverse and surprising, Something Burned Along the Southern Border maps a seldom-recorded region of Canada, the joint of Windsor–Detroit, and beyond. Like a scent, this poetry tugs, pulls open our memories. It smells like pancake houses, maple, diesel, tobacco, blood, and forest brush.”
—Emily Schultz, author of Songs for the Dancing Chicken and Heaven Is Small

01.27.10
Poetry in Windsor: Melanie Janisse interviews Robert Earl Stewart