Poetry. "More personal and local than the epic sprawl of his recent Poems From Naltsus Bichidin, Carl Thayler's Shake Hands goes after readers with a frequently agonized, always lively honesty. Barrooms, love affairs, roadside ephemera, bankrupt religion, a western sky under which recognizing one's inevitable loneliness becomes the only possible way to reach out to others; all these things swarm up at readers like barely comprehensible dangers lurching into one's headlights on an all night drive to nowhere in particular. One feels in these poems both Thayler's fear of writing them and his need to do so. These are not the comments of a smug cultural observer. Instead, Shake Hands reads like the knotted midnight confessions of the writer for whom only poems can manage to say what would otherwise never get said" -Mark Wallace.
Reviews and Other Links
http://jacketmagazine.com/25/smith-thayl.html