Winter Road

"Louis Jenkins writes satire as elegant as Horace but with motors in it and telephones and the North Shore."—Garrison KeillorSeveral of these poems are included in the performance script for NICE FISH, the play.From the acknowledged "master" of the prose poem comes a new gathering of sixty poems. The work in The Winter Road comprises an extended meditation on the nature of memory and its influence on everyday reality. Within poems that turn whimsical, ironic, and serious, whole imaginative worlds are created and glide the reader into pleasing and unexpected territory. As when Coronado's search for gold lands him empty-handed in Kansas, Jenkins reminds us that "miracles always have a cost," and that our desire for absolute truth can sometimes lead us nowhere.Louis Jenkins' poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, et al. and in The Best American Poetry 1999. He lives in Duluth, Minnesota.Old Man WinterOld man Winter doesn't like anything. He doesn't like dogs orcats or squirrels or birds, especially seagulls, or children orsmart-ass college students. He doesn't like loggers or environ-mentalists or snowmobilers or skiers in their stupid lycra outfits.He doesn't like Christmas or television. He doesn't like bureau-crats, lawyers or pliticians. There is a thing or two he could sayto the host of the local talk-radio show but he knows for a factthat the son-of-a-bitch does the broadcast from his condo inFlorida. He's pissed off about the OPEC oil conspiracy and theconspiracy of gas station owners to raise prices. He doesn't likeforeigners and he doesn't like his neighbors (not that he hasmany); when they finally die they just leave their junk all overthe yard. He doesn't like that. He doesn't like the look of the skyright now, either, overcast, a kind of jaundice color. He hatesthat. And that stand of spruce trees behind the house turningblack in the dusk . . . . The way it gets dark earlier every day. Hedoesn't like that.