Talking Back to the Exterminator

Poems, like politics, can be local and global, personal and cultural. In Daniel Bourne’ s Talking Back to the Exterminator, we see this interplay at work in these ruminations on place— our connections and disconnections to it— from Bourne’ s upbringing in southern Illinois to his later homes in Ohio, Poland, or the American Southwest. This connection certainly involves a sense of celebration, but also of anxiety and tension in realizing the fragility and impermanence of both self and surroundings. Yet, despite the opportunity as well as the challenge of memory— the way it is continually erased yet also continues to scribble in the brain— these poems also bear witness to how we push back against all the “ exterminations” in our lives.

Daniel Bourne was raised on a farm near the Little Wabash River in southeastern Illinois. He has worked in a tree nursery and rare book library, and traveled often to Poland, including as a Fulbright fellow for translation in 1985-87. Before retiring in 2020, he was professor of English at The College of Wooster in Ohio, where he edited the literary magazine Artful Dodge. The author of two previous books of poetry, his poetry and translations have appeared in American Poetry Review, Guernica, Salmagundi, Ploughshares, Colorado Review, and The Yale Review.