Colo-State-Pen: 18456: A Dark Miscellany
W.K. Stratton's 'Colo--State--Pen: 18456, A Dark Miscellany' is volume three in the Dreaming Sam Peckinpah Quintet (earlier entries are 'Dreaming Sam Peckinpah' and 'Ranchero Ford/Dying in Red Dirt Country'). The poems and prose deal with pain, sorrow, regret, disillusion, history, family breakdown, and Western landscapes. The title piece of 'Colo--State--Pen: 18456' is an epic-length poem dealing with Stratton's grandfather, a life-long criminal who served a prison at the Colorado State Penitentiary. In other pieces, Stratton increasingly turns his gaze to la frontera, the border between Texas and Mexico, and the Desert Southwest. Many of the pieces deal with the record of men mistreating women in abhorrent ways, one of the worst offenders being Stratton's grandfather. As with Stratton's previous books, oilfield roughnecks, bootleggers, brawlers, and outlaws turn up. 'Colo--State--Pen: 18456, A Dark Miscellany' is a dirge for lives gone astray.
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In our mythological odyssey, in search of a deeper look at our soul, we at times enter the forest at its darkest point (to borrow from Joseph Campbell).
W.K. Stratton wades in and encounters the beasts perched up in the family tree, shoots his poetic arrows up, and hits blood and bone. A fine and moving collection.
--Tom Russell, songwriter/painter/essayist
Santa Fe and Switzerland
The lines are thin here--where the ache of one man ends, and the other begins. Kip Stratton's words walk that line. We feel him teeter. We feel him give up, then somehow, in the most unlikely places of scorpion and snooker, discover his redemption.
You could call this memoir, but it is too poetic. This is oil-rig deep. This is history and childhood and the desert scuff we walk through every day.
This is the sad song we need to hear at 3 am, when no one but the radio is up with us. This is the companion you will carry with you in the back seat of your truck even years later, torn and yellowed, but still singing true.
--karla k morton, 2010 Texas State Poet Laureate
