Dancing Room Only

Dancing Room Only is a wild romp into the forgotten center of our people. With his signature rollicking style, a keen sense of humor, and an acute ear for dialect and voice, Reese archives the sinners and saints that haunt the Midwest and beyond. Author Kent Meyers writes of Reese's work: "In these poems, ordinary life with its children and neighbors crackles like a mirage, and shifts and opens, and we find we've been all along in San Quentin prison. What is it we just saw?-a five-year-old child swinging on the monkey bars, or a tattooed convict, crying? Reese's eye is the eye of a father, and he finds his world both alien and comforting. These are poems of praise and poems of warning, infused with love and latent violence. Reese makes us feel the threat throbbing inside the song." In Dancing Room Only:New and Selected Poems Reese is a well-traveled troubadour with Midwestern sensibility, and as the author of three widely-praised books of poetry, he knows how to blow our hearts sideways.