Yellow Moving Van

by Ron Koertge

Overview

Ron Koertge’s Yellow Moving Van is a collection of relaxed and buoyant and sometimes very funny poems that address Desi & Lucy with the same courtesy as Walt Whitman. The author celebrates his roots in the Mid-West and a few pages later stops off in Transylvania. These poems like to sometimes embrace and sometimes confound expectations, and they all stand together as enemies of the murky and pompous. There is apparently no subject—Prometheus, a fifty foot woman, or Death himself—that is unwilling to fall under his spell.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822986201
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	10/16/2018
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	85
Sales rank:	883,801
File size:	667 KB

About the Author

Ron Koertge, a long-time resident of South Pasadena, California, taught English and Creative Writing at Pasadena City College for thirty-seven years.  He has published more than a dozen books of poetry, and is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council, has poems in two volumes of Best American Poetry, and is a 2017 Pushcart Prize winner. Koertge is also the author of the poem “Negative Space,” short-listed for a 2017 Oscar in Animated Short Films. He teaches at Hamline University in their low-residency MFA program. 
 

Table of Contents

Contents I Please Provide a Brief Biographical Sketch Fright Night Snowman The Wolf's Dilemma Dear Reader, I Love Lucy Orpheus after Eurydice In the Folk Art Wing Reading at the Christian Academy True Account of Talking to the Breeze in South Pasadena Sing, Goddess Smitten Room 303 The Pillow Book and How It Applies to Hillhurst Avenue in West Hollywood II Yellow Moving Van At the Esso Station in Olney Two Transylvanian Girls Walk The Ultra-Modern Prometheus Thanks for Coming In Church Camp Two Weeks with Pay Coyote Song of Myselfie How to Get There Whispering Pines Artemis and Actaeon Cat Women of the Moon III I Married a Monster from Outer Space Now Finally Rome Wasn't Built in a Day Nevada Dear Citizen, Reading to the Bland The Sinful Woman The Associate Dean A Cast-Iron Boy Yearling Sale VFW Welcomes State Champions Life on the Farm Cassandra Works the Midnight Shift Disguised as a Teenage Boy Lovesick Girls in Prison Swine IV Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman Ode to Joy Men in Their Good Shoes Shooting Hoops Sirens Death Hands Me the Scythe The Other Annunciation Sun City Courtly Love in the Twenty-First Century A Surprise Visit Jack and the Beanstalk After the Funeral Mattress Palace Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

In the funhouse world of Ron Koertge, Mary’s halo is as big as an inner tube, Mrs. Death fills in for her dreaded husband, and it takes a whole day and a half to build Rome. These new poems will entertain you so well, you might not even notice how the poet is issuing everywhere little appeals to your heart.” —Billy Collins

“Who wouldn’t want to read poems entitled “Lovesick Girls in Prison”, “Reading to the Bland,” or “Death Hands Me the Scythe?” In Ron Koertge’s Yellow Moving Van, you might not be certain if you should laugh out loud or squirm with recognition at our common humanity.” —Laurel Ann Bogen

“Ron Koertge re-visits myths, write about farmers in the heartland, and chats with the breeze in Southern California. I’m going to give this book to all my friends.” —Charles Harper Webb

From the Publisher