Live from the Homesick Jamboree is a brave, brash, funny, and tragic hue and cry on growing up female during the 1970s, "when everything was always so awash" that the speaker finds herself adrift among adults who act like children. The book moves from adolescence through a dry-eyed, poignant exploration of two marriages, motherhood, and the larger world, with the headlong perceptiveness and brio characteristic of Adrian Blevins's work. This poetry is plainspoken and streetwise, brutal and beautiful, provocative and self-incriminating, with much musicality and a corrosive bravura, brilliantly complicated by bursts of vernacular language and flashes of compassion. Whether listening to Emmylou Harris while thinking she should be memorizing Tolstoy, reflecting on her "full-to-bursting motherliness," aging body, the tensions and lurchings of a relationship, or "the cockamamie lovingness" of it all, the language flies fast and furious. As the poet Tony Hoagland wrote of Blevins's previous book, The Brass Girl Brouhaha, "this is the dirty, trash-talking, highly edified real thang."

How to Drown a WolfThe Hospitality
The Theatre People
Ode to the Fish Fry
Origin of the Species
Weaning Electra
School of the Arts
In the Almost-Evening of Almost-Canada
Nocturne
First Fall in Maine
Live from the Homesick Jamboree
Novelette
Big Rain Day
Country Song
Semantic Relations
Poem for My Daughter August Disparaging the Gossamer Depictions of the Women of Certain Southern Texts
First Winter in Maine
Why the Marriage Failed
Firstborn
Morning Song
Jesus Saves
Watching The NewsHour
CV Rider
Dream in Which I Find Myself Confronted Yet Again with Why The Marriage Failed
Dear New Mothers of America
Why the Marriage Failed II
Dear Reader
Hey You
The Second Marriage
Woman by Woman
Sin City
How We Talk
The Way She Figured He Figured It
If the Universe Sends Me a Grip
The Waning
The Imperative Sentence
Now There's a River
Acknowledgments
Notes