Strange Valentine

Voices family, history, sexuality, and identity in the working-class Midwest.

Loudermilk utilizes confessional, persona, and third-person poems throughout this intimate yet socially conscious first collection. "Strange Valentine" is an indictment of love, fixating on the paranoid relationship between body and state, on the dangerous relationship between family history and sexual history, and on the elusive relationship between gender and sexuality - specifically as experienced in the working-class towns of the southernmost Midwest.

Riding highly crafted rhythms in sound, line, and invented form, Loudermilk's multivoiced storytelling resounds with the characters and heartbreaks of the heartland.

Kicked Dog Kicked dog, I know your grief, why you don't bother to tell the moon your troubles.

It belongs to the night, deaf and godless, it won't hear you.

It is cold and breathless. Its heart is chalk, it has no time for lyrics. Where's your man gone, kicked dog? Left the house without a word? Dog I know your need, why you stay at his feet like a stone face-down.

Someday when everyone has left him, you'll be there, him ripening on the stair. For 39 rings of the telephone, you'll taste love, hold it in your mouth.