Twang

Set inside a crumbling rural landscape where preachers don’t do as they say and men die by violence, neglect and strange new viruses, the poems in Twang revisit and reconfigure narratives about Appalachia and the AIDS Crisis years of the 1980s and early 1990s. They weave elements of contemporaneous music and culture, folklore, religion, politics, bluegrass, and square dancing to portray a young queer protagonist who encounters old thrills and new risks, his sexuality outlaw yet in vogue as he navigates conflicting ideas about desire and death in the time of trickle down, pop music video megastars, and Just Say No.

Twang bursts with vivid, frank imagery, propulsive sounds, and stark honesty in poems that play with forms traditional and not. It confronts family trauma, generational fear, and a culture smothered by masculinity and its perpetual refusal to change. It seeks to both understand and release. It welcomes you into a poetic universe intended to delight, entertain and linger long after reading.

ISBN: 978-1-942004-99-8

$18.00

Order Now

Praise for Twang

Up close, it sounded like the men when they finished, their faith, jostling what they didn’t understand against what they secretly wished, writes poet Ben Kline in his unflinching new book Twang, a must have collection that bristles with holler talk, hay fields, double-wides, Styrofoam coolers of beer, Satan, Madonna and the fervor of kissing boys and no name men by the lake. A place where gay demons [bring] ruin to what upstanding citizens call decency, though a $50 dollar donation to the church can go a long way in saving a soul from eternal damnation. Kline brings gristle, gut and bone, giving voice to what it means to grow up deeply rural, Appalachian and queer, busting open every stereotype along the way.

–Kari Gunter-Seymour, Ohio Poet Laureate, Author of Dirt Songs

With language lush as Whitman’s and a cadence that twirls between Madonna and creation epics, Ben Kline’s “Twang” breathes life into Appalachia in ways we have never witnessed before. Tender, bucolic, celestial, erotic, queer—Kline’s poems are a tractor bucking, a lover’s touch in the dark, witchcraft wrought from honey and river baptisms, uncles dissolving like the Eucharist. Brilliant and immense, “Twang” is a true literary feat. “Don’t they know / my dirt tongue / sops the blood / off their faces?”

–Todd Dillard, author of Ways We Vanish and Ragnarök at the Father-Daughter Dance

Ben Kline strikes a miraculous balance between offering us individual poems that are honed—precise in their formal choices, deeply musical, tightly coiled—yet add up to a collection that has the wild architecture and unfurling sprawl of a novel. Twang’s complicated portrait of family dynamics, occasionally tender but often violent, and the blood and gristle of living close to the land, is matched by its nuance in capturing a very specific American political and economic era that is stitched-through by the realities of queerness in a time when the AIDS Quilt felt like a shout against the void. “After she caught me voguing Mom told the third cousins / I took drugs,” confides the opening to “My Villain Origin Story,” a playful title that, as is so often the case with Kline’s humor, yields an unsparing truth. Twang isn’t a book you read; Twang is a world you step into.

–Sandra Beasley, author of Made to Explode

About the Author

Hailing from the farmland valleys of the west Appalachian foothills, Ben Kline (he/him) lives in Cincinnati, Ohio. A poet, storyteller and Madonna podcaster, Ben spends his days at the University of Cincinnati Libraries, where he cofounded, coordinates, hosts the Poetry Stacked reading and workshop series.

Ben is the author of the chapbooks Sagittarius A* and Dead Uncles, as well as the forthcoming full-length collections It Was Never Supposed to Be (Variant Literature) and Twang (ELJ Editions.) His work has appeared in Poet Lore, Copper Nickel, Pithead Chapel, MAYDAY, Florida Review, Southeast Review, DIAGRAM, Poetry, and other publications. You can read and learn more at his website.

Twang

Praise for Twang

About the Author

Discover more from ELJ Editions