Rowing Inland
Charts the emotional, political, and economic landscapes of the working-class Metro Detroit community and its residents.
Rowing Inland, Jim Daniels's fifteenth book of poetry is a time machine that takes the reader back to the Metro Detroit of his youth and then accelerates toward the future. With humor and empathy, the author looks at his own family's challenges and those of the surrounding community where the legacy handed down from generation to generation is one of survival. The economic hits that this community has to endure create both an uncertainty about its future and a determined tenacity.
Divided into four sections, Rowing Inland calls out key moments from the author's life. The events that inspire many of these poems took place a long time ago and often it has taken the poet his entire life to write about those experiences and write about them with the necessary emotional distance. For example, some of the poems in the section "Late Invocation for Magic" reference the first girl he ever kissed and her accidental death by fire. In the last section of the book, Daniels approaches the current political and social standings in Detroit with lines like, "The distance to Baghdad or Kandahar / is measured in rowboat coffins / while here in the fatty palm of The Mitten / minor skirmishes electrify tedium." Although it focuses on Detroit's metropolitan area, the book can be considered a snapshot of working-class life anywhere across the country. Daniels casts his lens on a way of life that is often distorted or ignored by the powers that be. He zooms in on street level where all the houses may look alike but each holds its own secrets and dreams.
To paraphrase novelist and screenwriter Richard Price, Detroit is the "zip code for [Daniels's] heart"--a place that his writing will always come back to. Readers of contemporary poetry with a regional persuasion will enjoy this collection.
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Jim Daniels's recent books include Apology to the Moon, Birth Marks, and Eight Mile High (stories). He is also the writer/producer of a number of short films, including The End of Blessings. Born in Detroit, Daniels is the Thomas Stockham Baker University Professor at Carnegie Mellon University.
The poet Jim Daniels claims that "If you look at anything long and hard enough, / it catches fire." His fine new poetry collection is the magnifying glass he uses to recover the details too often overlooked or forgotten, his "heart thick with grief's metal-flake." And just like a magnifying glass, these poems sometimes catch the light of the sun and the reader can feel the book almost burning in his hands.
--Kristofer Collins "Pittsburgh Post-Gazette"[. . .] throughout Rowing Inland [. . .] Daniels [. . .] craft[s] the sometimes-mundane into something notable.
--Fred Shaw "Pittsburgh City Paper"These are glandular poems, then universal, because Daniels is an American Standard for all who grew up in cement cities, but also striking out for everyone who's watched family as part of cultural change.
--Grace Cavalieri "Washington Independent Review of Books"Dipped in acetate, these poems strip Detroit of any pretense and offer a flawless lesson in descriptive concision. But Rowing Inland delights because of Jim Daniels's storytelling skills--a chronicle of incidents and anecdotes perfectly suited to poetic form.
--Matt Sutherland "Foreword Reviews"Jim's wonderful sense of humor and simple human grace shine through in this new collection. Check it out.
--John Beck "Our Daily Work/Our Daily Lives"With scarcely a wasted word, the speaker's examination of his past is excruciatingly objective and pitiless. I value these poems for their precision and honesty, and I appreciate Daniels's wit, dryness of tone, and penchant for the surreal.
--Terry Blackhawk "2013 Kresge literary fellow"
