Rigging a Chevy into a Time Machine and Other Ways to Escape a Plague (e-book) (used book) | bookbook.eu

Description

Rigging a Chevy into a Time Machine and Other Ways to Escape a Plague, won the 2015 Trio Award, selected by Neil Shepard, and the 2015 Marsh Hawk Press Rochelle Ratner Memorial Award, selected by Stephanie Strickland. The book is published by Trio House Press.

Every once in a great while, a writer appears whose style, subject, and voice are like no other, so far outside the mainstream, they constitute the discovery of something akin to a new country. Carolyn Hembree is such a writer. Her Rigging a Chevy into a Time Machine and Other Ways to Escape a Plague is a book-length narrative – part murder-mystery, part Appalachia folklore, part brush arbor revival. It’s poetry of the highest order – language invented, borrowed, recorded as if from oral histories or overheard at prayer meetings – language shaped to a strict but riveting series of expressions. Her main character, Vitalis Cleb, lives partly in the trapped present tense, in a beat-up trailer with a dirt yard and a Chevy truck up on concrete blocks, unable to drive or fly away from this place; and partly, he lives in a world of visions that look back to his forebears (from whom he’s given primers, parables and fables that teach him how to live and die here), and look forward into a future where the visionary Sears Catalog Girl might reveal to him (‘with x-ray vision”) the significance of this place, as well as the way to escape it, as if it were a plague. Like Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Carolyn Hembree’s Rigging a Chevy into a Time Machine and Other Ways to Escape a Plague brings its strange, bewildering world gradually into focus as we enter the force field of her language where the past still haunts the present and shapes each character’s fate.
— Neil Shepard, 2015 Trio Award judge

Carolyn Hembree is a firebrand for staying true and for reaching into the beyond. She writes high-powered and unwaveringly of the fearlessness of the human ticker. There is innuendo, solitude, jubilation, and awelessness. Her precise phrasing teaches us to be alert in our living. These new poems are so quietly brilliantly crafted, so mindful and brimming with pluck. Each turn of line, gorgeously sewn with heart gut string and _sine qua non_.
— Nikky Finney, National Book Award winner

“Kill the harbinger” it begins, knowing what we are careening toward. Caustic, jangly language all up everywhere and broken u-turning through a freaky, grim yet brightly ramshackle Hill Country for an account of loss the poet, steely and smartly, won’t leave mythic. Carolyn Hembree has let no sentence alone, prodding the two-headed viper of vernacular till it drives fangs into desperation, quantum mechanics, the Holy Spirit, a Sears catalog, a country song bleeding through radio static. “Ain’t we all hiding/ some kind of plague under our fig leaf,” asks one of Hembree’s cast. Maybe so, but this stunning collection tears the leaf away.
— Douglas Kearney, Whiting Award winner