Bottleneck Slide: Poems

Curtis Hayes is a story teller. His words carry you through his poems with an easy, every day, rhythm as if you’re on a two day drive filled with eye-grabbing details that add up and uncover emotions that linger with you like the “Bottleneck Slide” on a favorite song’s fade out. If you’ve never read a Curtis Hayes poem, think of Tom Waits and maybe that will give you an idea of what he’s got going on. You get draining dead end jobs, red headed Dallas women that you know won’t be around when you turn the page, romance and movies you wish you could still believe in and Screaming Jay Hawkins giving you the magic of music from The Palomino stage and then telling you all about women and life in the parking lot. These are the kinds of poems you can linger over with black coffee, rye toast and runny eggs as you wonder if you ever had a place to go home to.-Tony Gloeggler, author of Until the Last Light LeavesBottleneck Slide tells it straight. In this world, friends die young, fathers disappear, women come and go. Work is physical. Life is hard. And success? It’s always just around the corner. “we were told/ that we just had to reinvent ourselves.” These thought-provoking poems bear witness to an examined life; they’re rich with metaphor, and the eccentric, down-to-earth characters who populate the landscape are unforgettable. Curtis Hayes elevates the quotidian into art. - Alexis Rhone Fancher, poetry editor, Cultural Weekly, author, Enter Here, and Junkie Wife.