Patsy Cline is on the Radio by Barbara Dahlberg

“Patsy Cline is on the Radio” moves us through changing eras and changing landscapes—rural Minnesota, the New Mexico dessert, a lonely Oklahoma home—full of lively detail made livelier by the realization that illness and death are always near. In a straight-shooting, sometimes humorous, never sentimental voice, Dahlberg looks the stuff of life—and the stuff of death—smack in the eyes and creates little treasures for us to feast on.

–Nancy Krygowski is the author of Velocity.

I like a poem with no room for lies to tell; Here are poems that do not lie. Here are poems for how to be in this racing world, today— bones, cancer, the red, red heart of seeing what’s right in front of you. These poems are woman poems to finger over a chipped tooth & to grin with. I like a poem that shows its belly. Barbara’s poems feel like a map of being human, they are crisp & daring in their sight. Some of them will keep you sitting down in the chair long after the reading, they are still reading you.

–Vanessa German is a sculptor, painter, writer, activist, performer and poet.

The poems in Patsy Cline is on the Radio are all dirt, sky, and water—made of that which, no matter how hard we try, we cannot deny. Dahlberg writes, in “Oklahoma, April 1981,” “Rocks run in my family.” And each poem in this collection is a precise relic of former lives, former selves, bodies lost and always on the edge of being lost. Dahlberg is proof that there are honest poets left, the kind whose vulnerability and succinct lines tell us to live now, to listen now—no matter how scared we might be.

–Stacey Waite, author of Butch Geography