review first published in misfitmagazine.net, Issue No. 37, Winter 2024
George Wallace. Resurrection Song, Roadside Press, available through www.magicaljeep.com 2023,
250 pages, $20-
Make no mistake about it, this is a massive tome that feels like a compilation of a life’s hard work, living, traveling, reading, and contemplating life and literature. The collection is not only large in size, but it is impressive in its scope, and stylistic variations. There are brief pieces, long sprawling ones, short lines, long lines, a little bit of everything. My personal favorite is “Mayakovsky in New York” (not be confused with the equally as impressive “Lorca Doesn’t Live Here Anymore”) where the author enters the mind of that wildman poet and makes us feel what he feels in a totally alien civilization,
“Mayakovsky
wanted to mount
new york city like a
French whore—legs astride
the Woolworth building…
….the great
iconoclast was
holding
the future
in one
hand like
some
movie
ape”
If there is a subject to be written about or a place to go, odds are Wallace has read about it, written a poem there and/or traveled through it.
—Alan Catlin, author of Bar Guide for the Seriously Deranged and many others
