Tuscaloosa Bypass by Cecele Allen Kraus

In TUSCALOOSA BYPASS, Cecele Kraus travels across a complicated country of hard living and poverty, transience, loss and resilience. As in her first book, Dreaming Barranquilla, she draws the reader into a time and place of the past, yet creates a mood of immediacy.  With spare language, the reader is squarely placed in the religious culture of the old South and into the heart of a girl who bit by bit makes sense of the world around her.

–Jan Marin Tramontano, Standing on the Corner of Lost and Found and Woman Sitting in a Cafe

Rating:  ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]

In TUSCALOOSA BYPASS, Cecele Kraus‘ poems arouse our senses to the sights and sounds between the birth cry and the death rattle of post World War II America.  We see devout churchgoers whose shouts in the Amen Corner comfort the soul, marvel at the hands of young girls working wonders with a needle and thread, take delight in the giddiness of budding sexuality, and listen in stunned disbelief to the deafening silence in the wake of the heinous acts of men in white hoods and robes. The TUSCALOOSA BYPASS of Cecele Kraus‘ imagination is relentless in seeking out places in the heart where we often fear to tread.

–Wesley Brown, Darktown Strutters, Tragic Magic, and Push Comes to Shove

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]

Come travel the Deep South in an age where the world was filled with “pay phones and lines/ of people making calls to loved ones/ before they died,” and where folks were “not allowed to go swimming on Sundays.”  Cecele Allen Kraus’ Tuscaloosa Bypass is simply delightful.

Leah Maines, author of Beyond the River, winner of the Kentucky Writers’ Coalition Chapbook Competition (KWC Press)