Skip to main content

Alpine Strangers records selections from All My Rowdy Friends

Alpine Strangers is Nate McFadden and Cody Grimm’s exploration of the stories that make us human, often found in the unlikeliest of places.alpine strang.jpg


A finalist in the poetry category for the 13th USA Book Awards, and named an exemplar book of poetry by The Washington Independent Review of Books, Stephen Scott Whitaker’s  All My Rowdy Friends explores addiction, gender, jail, pop culture, and family. Whitaker is the author of three previous chapbooks of poetry.


West Coast meets East Coast. All My Rowdy Friends is darkly joyful. It’ll make your head spin-- Podcast Weekly


All My Rowdy Friends, published by PunksWritePoems Press, from Chesterfield, VA gets the California remix by Nate McFadden and Cody Grimm, the podcasting duo behind the Alpine Strangers.


“All My Rowdy Friends is sex appeal...dark with an edgy bite to it. Love painted stark. There’s a grit to the sex that makes it squirm. Poetry that includes visits to childhood, to mind-altering states and beyond, and a cast of characters that will slice your fingers if you press the page too hard.”  –Jax Miller, best selling author of Freedom’s Child.
“Whitaker breaks the poetic fourth wall, that single-step remove from the text that situates the reader in a secure place as an (often passive) observer, and insists that the reader participate in that reimagining.  Make no mistake, this is a collection that engages and sometimes repels at the same time. Brilliant, as the brightest light is brilliant, this is a light to which no one will be immune.” – Jamie Brown, Author of Sakura, 2013 Best Book of Verse, Delaware Press Association.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

#PresidentBannon, feudal #America. Dugin's influence on the White House

Op Ed. Ramble. Steve Bannon is often described as a Neo-Nazi, or just a Nazi. He really isn’t. That’s way too simple.  He knows his Nazi imagery and iconography, evident from the “America First” inauguration speech, the lingo of the campaign, plus the regime’s early policy. Bannon claims to be a Nationalist, one with an originalist view of the Constitution, much like Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s pick for SCOTUS.  So what do you get when you thread a Fascism fetish, Old-School Constitutional thinking, and capitalism?   American feudalism. A loose federal government, controlled by a strong military, the oligarchy ruling class lording over the spoils of the states which would possibly be recombined, even, into loose nations, pooling resources, and trade leverage. Dystopia schmopia.  And how would that even happen?   We’ll have to go through Russia to get there. If you’re just catching onto Steve Bannon, and Stephen Miller for that matter, two power hungry conservatives ru

Summer Poetry Reading in Rehoboth

If anyone's interested in a mid-summer run to Rehoboth's outlet malls, consider Tuesday, July 27th, and stop by the Rehoboth Beach Librar y for the summer poetry series. Besides moi, Denise Clemmons, poet and food critic for the Cape Gazette, and Sherry Chapplle, poet and professor. Excellent company. Books will be for sale afterwards. It's a quality series, and full of surprises. Garry Hanna has done a bang-up job organizing the summer series. Bring a few quarters to ward off the meter maid. Reading starts at 7:00 PM.

Common Core Standards and Urban Decay Inspire First Poem for 30/30 May

This May I will be giving my time to write 30 new poems for Tupelo Press, which is in the throes of raising money via crowd-sourcing for new projects. They are non profit. Grants remain at recession lows. So, this morning as I met with my graduating seniors during their one on one conference (we discuss plans for success, grades, papers, attendance, etc) I pulled up Common Core Apps while waiting for a senior to fetch his book for his book report. The app is Common Curriculum , a cool lesson plan and web posting service. For some reason the idea struck to adopt some of the standards for a United States of Poetry--which sounded dystopian and Orwellian to my ears. So I mashed up some made up standards with some urban decay riffs. The urban decay riffs will need tweaking as they don't really strike any new visual ground, but rather cull standard tropes together. The made-up Common Core riffs are meta, and will also need to be made consistent. There is obvious commentary about CC