Poetry. "Brandi Homan's BOBCAT COUNTRY is the unholy love child of Lynda Barry and Ween. Fabulously honest, surprising, and hilarious, these poems are a TGIFriday's extravaganza of retarded American enthusiasm, deftly rendered. Homan loves the 'Fuck yeaaaah!'s our culture hoots just before it drives its rental car off a cliff. Her details are so spot on, their mere presence relieves us of the need for contrived, 'poetic' resolutions. That's what makes the poems true—there are no easy answers in them. They make me proud to be a woman, and yet, simultaneously, wanna sincerely rock out in a parking lot to rape rock"—Jennifer L. Knox.
Author City: CHICAGO, IL USA
Brandi Homan is editor-in-chief of Switchback Books, a feminist press that publishes poetry by women. She earned her MFA from Columbia College, Chicago, and her MA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work has appeared in (or is forthcoming from) numerous journals, including Barn Owl Review, Born Magazine, Diagram, MiPOesias, Natural Bridge, North American Review, and Salt Hill. She is originally from Iowa and writes professionally in advertising. She is the author of two collections, both from Shearsman Books: BOBCAT COUNTRY (2010) and HARD REDS (2008).
Reviews and Other Links
Kristin Abraham in NewPages
Min Jung Oh in Tarpaulin Sky Reviews
interview by Elizabeth Hildreth @ Bookslut
author site
"A glimpse of the titles in this book—'My Mother Can't Stand This Poem,' 'Why I Hate Ian Harris, "Reality TV Has Ruined My Childhood'—hints at the energy, sass, and verve we find here in this freshly observed world. Displaying an admirable range, Brandi Homan offers us both the haunting prose poem sequence, 'Recurring Dream House,' and the seemingly casual, at times caustic, observations of a 'Drugstore Cowgirl.' Homan excels at the telling detail; BOBCAT COUNTRY opens and closes with poems deeply rooted in the 1980s Midwest. This texture provides welcome humor in a bleak landscape as we follow the exploits of troubled teenage girls wearing 'blue Wet-n-Wild nail polish' who drink 'Zima through licorice straws.' The accomplishment of this book is that through careful observation and precise, painterly detail, Homan does more than capture one time, one place—she gives us a deeply felt, reverberating world."
—Beth Ann Fennelly
"How can a line of language be so directed and searing and still entertain the messy feast of the bleary eyed ever-birthing world? Brandi Homan's work wakes the nervous system and embodies the difficult beauty and complexity of the question. Lucky readers, lucky us."
—Selah Saterstrom