Derelict Days in That Derelict Town by Alan May

Derelict Days in That Derelict Town: New and Uncollected Poems is wide-ranging and far-reaching. The book covers the subjects of rural life, romantic love, early death, gun violence, fathers/forefathers, myths, legends, and real and imaginary monsters. May’s inventiveness keeps Derelict Days humming along. Here we see prose and prose-like poems, concrete poems, an abundance of poems written in loose meter with internal rhyme, and haiku-like epigrams. Buy this book and experience what Cintia Santana (author of The Disordered Alphabet) calls “a quirky, at times lonely, playful, and wondrous ride of the imagination.”

Alan May’s Derelict Days in That Derelict Town is magically alive, animated by place and sound. This book hisses like a snake or old truck, draws us through the field to the woods, through a landscape populated with all kinds of “Everyday Monsters”: foxes, rodents, wolves, wild boar, hunters, and even stranger, more fabulist beasts. May’s strong, often humorous, unique voice makes the ordinary and rural spaces—the plant life, cigarettes, and rust of Appalachia—surreal and mythic. We are left wondering how the boy at the center of this book both is and isn’t “the monster.” We feel, ultimately, “as if/ anything were possible/ there in the woods far from home.”

—Sara Moore Wagner, author of Lady Wing Shot


The poems in Derelict Days in That Derelict Town may leave you feeling as though Alan May sees things the rest of us walk right past, and afterwards you cannot help but wonder how you missed so much that is right there to be seen, heard, and felt. Here are poems of rivers, horses, empty fields, and always-searching language, where “A comet flings itself across the dusky sky./ Cars roll by, their windows at half-mast.” The longer sequences of “The Boy and the Monster,” and “Six Gothics” sustain some of the most ingenious imagery this side of Wallace Stevens and Russell Edson, with “A mouse sits up/ in his little coffin,/ curls his tiny claw into a fist.” and “Thus begins/ the dream of the wild boar and the priestess/ who wields a fork and a pinwheel.” Alan May’s imagination is a wonderful place to visit, and I kind of wish I lived there.

—Jesse Graves, author of Merciful Days and Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine


Alan May’s fourth book, Derelict Days in That Derelict Town: New and Uncollected Poems, takes the reader on a quirky, at times lonely, playful, and wondrous ride of the imagination. In the face of heartbreaking realities, imaginative turns of mind render the real malleable enough to allow for the creation of an alternative landscape alongside it. Far from easy escapism, the oneiric transformations are salve and path for the heart’s sustenance and survival. The speaker in these poems knows what it is to live inside and outside a snow globe at once, to be a boy and a horse brought together in a moment imbued by mercy. May’s purposeful language, filled with touches of humor, wordplay, and the pleasure of internal and near-rhyme, all serve to give form to and bring this imagination into being. The quirky wrapping of these poems peels away to reveal that, against all odds, underneath the everyday horrors of the world, survives a tenderness, alive, capacious, nothing less than miraculous.

—Cintia Santana, author of The Disordered Alphabet


Alan May interrogates memory and imagination in this collection of arresting days, underscoring how the mundane and ordinary are anything but that, if we will only pay attention. But I’d be remiss if I suggested his poems are somber affairs, dour and dreary. His interrupted narratives are romps of dereliction, full of sly mischief and telling critiques. They turn the world on its head in a language that delights the tongue and strikes the ear with calliope notes that will have the reader turning to look for the ice cream truck only to find deer licking the store windows.

—Todd Davis, author of Ditch Memory: New & Selected Poems


The poems of Alan May’s Derelict Days in that Derelict Town invite readers to encounter the transformative boundary between the real and the surreal. What is porous, what is possible, and where can the imagination carry us? In May’s provocative poems, the speaker urges us to perceive the truth and melancholy in overlapping worlds. Southern Gothic meets Office Space where wiffle balls and abandoned shopping malls entangle with encounters with wolves and monsters. In unforgettable poems where allegory and fairy tale blend into the wonder of the untamable, torch-hunted being, we are asked, “where is the lovely child / running through the forest where is he / who is miraculously healed?” Derelict Days in that Derelict Town invites us into the forest of metaphor where we encounter unforgettable lyricism in the shadows.

—Tyler Mills, author Hawk Parable and Tongue Lyre



Alan May grew up near Florence, AL. He holds a BA from the University of North Alabama and two master’s degrees from the University of Alabama. He has published four books of poetry. His poems have appeared in Appalachian Places, The Hollins Critic, The Hong Kong Review, The Idaho Review, New Orleans Review, The New York Quarterly, and others. He works as a librarian for Knox County Public Library, and he lives in Knoxville, TN. 



Book Information:

· Paperback: 84 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-480-2

$18

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