correction line is a powerful and evocative poem sequence that reconstructs memory through ancestral connections, and personal history. The poetry is as fundamental as the southern prairie landscape in its stark realities and progressively elemental in its distinctive risks with structure and imagery. It is roots poetry, humorous, anecdotal and wise, but also original, unexpected and profound.
Harvested from the prairies, Cooley’s writing fiddles with forms, swerves among the vernacular, the comical, the meditative, the linguistic, and the personal. His work exudes a strong commitment to local and contemporary understandings of writing and a continued experimentation with his postmodernist leanings.
correction line affirms Cooley’s desire to break from the inexorable narrative and offer poetry its place in the everyday world, while allowing its aesthetic to claim the space and time of the Prairies in its form, cadence and meanings. As the title suggests there are lines that correct what must change, as there are lines to correct what is already known. It is through this convergence of memory and history that Cooley’s poems shape understanding.
Dennis Cooley
