Family Talks by Kevin J. McDaniel

Family Talks always pursues the truth in the moments and details that attend to family life. McDaniel offers poignant memories of childhood, adulthood, and stories that allow him to explore loss, moving on, and the wonderment of play.  This collection is energetic and honest.

–Russ Wood, editor of the Clinch Mountain Review, Instructor of English at Southwest Virginia Community College.

Recalling Tolstoy’s observation, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” the poems in Family Talks sensitively explore that edge between happiness and unhappiness, between staying and going, between permanence and impermanence. McDaniel’s family is your family, too.

–Parks Lanier, Jr. Appalachian Georgics and Collected Poems

Kevin J. McDaniel’s vivid poems immerse us in a family’s pivotal moments, which become intensified by memories, and interrupted by those for whom they aren’t monumental.  We hear the family’s “jabbered babble” and a daughter’s “heart harmonize rhythms/on a monitor”; see a “Cloud checkered/salmon sky” and the “Rust metastasized” “puke-green hull” of a ’64 GMC.  The images, humor, and family members become real and stay with us.

 –Chelsea Adams, At Last Light, Looking for a Landing, and Java Poems