John Glowney
Fish Child is redolent with beauty and unflinching in its witness of poverty and the working class. Turn to the haunting “Paint,” about a Navy painter juxtaposed with paint-addicted children in Romania, or “Moonshot,” which grapples with the myth of meritocracy via the sweet smile of a kid serving up fries. Beached whales, like punctuation, repeat through the text, a reminder that we’re all from the same place, all going to the same place, “all eight billion of us/ holding on to each other/ trying to stay upright.
—Katie Farris
from Paint
My next-door neighbor Will tells me about
color,
a Navy painter, a lifer,
waves of gunmetal gray for aircraft carriers,
chartreuse for the mess halls,
robin’s-egg blue in the captain’s quarters,
thirty years breathing
the pigments of war.
*
In Bucharest,
children’s faces emerge from plastic bags
glittered
by vapors of paint,
the intoxicating iridescence
replacing food
for days.
*
Military painters, Will tells me,
regular guys,
could match lavender and moss green,
could set the tone of a room
by choosing the right blush,
and nobody screwed with them.
ISBN 978-0-936481-64-7 $17