Crow Milk

By Rick Agran

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1882291557
• ISBN13: 9781882291557
• Release Date: April 1997
• Publisher: Oyster River Pr
• Length: 80 Pages
• Weight: 0.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.8" x 0.3" x 5.8"

Customer Reviews

Crow Milk Helps to Take Away the Taste of Adulthood

During a roadtrip I picked this slim volume off the shelf for a gander from a bookstore in magical Ojai, California. I was intrigued by the title, read something about Thomas Lux and dove in. Sitting in a brick courtyard with ivy on the walls (which the Local Hero bookstore/cafe supplied) these poems plucked some heartstrings with deft aplomb. Each poem has a childish delicacy that reminds one (at least me) how foolish adult constructs can rule one's life. There is humor and sadness and beauty in Agran. On the light side there are poems about horse-girls on the playground (something I recall with unabashed joy when I gaze back). In a sadder key there is a particularly disturbing (in a good challenging way) description of a girl who flashes him with 'forlorn nipples' from her car. The reaction is ... Well, anyway, read. These poems are Art (yes, with a capital 'a') and they can be used as tools to confront (not just escape from) the inner-workings of children turned all too adult. Welcome the nostalgia, and invite better parts of yourself you've discarded back.

Crow Milk

I entered the poems as a reader, was quickly transformed into a participant, and exited each piece with a vivid memory so clear I was convinced I was an actual participant in every experience Rick described. He opened the door to my imagination, and I was free to fill in my own details.In the poem Cathedral, Washington DC 1993, I wore my sleeveless print dress, took the seat just left of the center aisle in the tenth pew, admired the stained glass windows, and drank in the music of the string quartet while waiting for the event to begin.In another poem, One Circle, I heard the machine turning water into coffee and smelled the freshly toasted bread, the strawberry jam, and the wafting smoke of the cigarette. I can still see Jack's black leather boots leaving prints in the grass.The Crow Milk experience is a series of journeys to be savored.

Here are the unloved, forgotten, returned to life ...

"....the unloved, forgotten or unseen return to life in Mr. Agran's clear vision: crows, abandoned children, people with AIDS, ... children have seen far too much but survive into artful singing. Often the adults choose not to see...Agran holds it all up for us to see, with the same humor and sass as his crows, as if to say--Don't you see how it all shines?" So writes Mekeel McBride. Poems in Crow Milk, by the host of WUNH's weekly interviews program "Bon Mot" on the spoken word, touch on common themes of concern, as in "At the Edges of Everything...": unloved, unbaptized, unwanted, unfed / the mortal infants of infant mortality, have returned / To this earth embodied as crows. In limbo, these children learned what to live: A petty thievery of the promised land. Steal quietly, little children, the shadows/ Of crows, black comfort....Other favorites are "Iowa lullaby for a child in the field," "Picked by accident," "Confessional basket- ball," "Wearing Dan's white shirt backwards," and for hunting season, "Shot and left," where the poet recalls "Silence between sounds, unsafe, hollow....a loon-call trill....In woods filled with hunters...." "Unseen toreador" was inspired by a scene in a suburban front yard in Manchester NH: "Black bull \ charging every red leaf \ falling from a sugar maple...."Then try "Shivaree" (read by Garrison Keillor on a Writer's Almanac on public radio. Rick Agran's poems are intriguing "snapshots of life, mini-stories with plot, character, tears and laughter." Take a trip to the kitchens, back woods and coast, and return in memory to fun and games and self-discovery in kindergarten, with this perceptive guide in Crow Milk, avoiding the traffic. So then you'll "see how it all shines!"

Brilliant and lyrical!

Brilliant and lyrical!His poems come from a space deep within himself. That place where men dwell, inarticulate and dumb, huge, ponderous and unblinking. Somehow, Mr. Agran is able to articulate that space, bring words from that chasm within, bright, brilliant and, yet tinged with humor. I heard his poems on Garrison Keillor's "The Writer's Almanac" and knew that I had to have this book. I wasn't disappointed!