Last Resort

JACK CROCKER has published poems in The Texas Review, Southern Poetry Review, Mississippi Review, and other journals, and fiction in The Cimarron Review. His poems have been anthologized in The Texas Anthology, Mississippi Writers: Reflections of Childhood, Texas Stories and Poems, and Florida in Poetry. He has written for educational television, including ""Introduction to Folksongs,"" (scripted and performed). An interview with Galway Kinnell appeared in Walking Down Stairs. A biography of Jimmy Rodgers was published in Mississippi Heroes and of Sergeant York in Heroes of Tennessee. He has written songs for StaFree Publishing Company and had a recording contract with Fretone Records of Memphis, Tennessee. Currently he is associate professor of English at Florida Gulf Coast University, where he was founding dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

"The poems in The Last Resort fall thematically into four or five overlapping silos: poems about the making of poems; about time's abrasions; about nature's benign/malevolent indifference; about the cultural tattoos of growing up in the Mississippi Delta; about women, guilt, and love; about the inescapable separateness of the first-person pronoun. The unifying sensibility is the 'I' that got us in this fortunate human mess in the first place. Turned horizontally, it is a barbell that grows heavier with time, making the poems a series of psychological bench presses. In the absence of a Spotter the weight is lightened only by irony, a comic self-consciousness, and ultimately acceptance." - Jack Crocker"