A Mouth for Picket Fences by Barry Napier
A Mouth For Picket Fences
by Barry Napier
Print ISBN-13: 978-1-926912-06-6
Editor: Rich Ristow
Publisher: Needfire Poetry
Pages: 88
Dimensions: 5.25″x8″
Cover Price: $9.99
E-book ISBN-13: 978-1-926912-07-3
Formats: html, js, mobi, epub, pdf, rtf, lrf, pdb, txt
Price: $2.99
Kindle ISBN-13: 978-1-926912-28-8
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Price: $2.99
Now available at: Needfire, Createspace, Amazon, Amazon Kindle and Smashwords.com.
The bulk of the poems within are mostly dark, but not so dark that they would fall neatly into the genre of “horror poetry.” The collection deals with normal people, assumed to be living within the same neighborhood or town, and how they are affected by loss, the presence of evil and the testing of their moral and spiritual beliefs.
Broken into three parts, A Mouth for Picket Fences operates with a very subtle narrative thread connecting the three parts. The parts are distributed as follows:
Part 1: Normalcy: This group of poems deals with how people cope with the monotony of their everyday lives. These poems are, for the most part, not very dark at all but they do deal with the range of human emotion, from loss to lust and everything in between, as well as how the secrets people keep hidden can eventually shape their perceptions of the world and their lives. There are no overly successful or rich people in these poems. These are normal people, dealing with every day (albeit morose and humbling) human experiences.
Part 2: The Darkness Weighs Us: This group of poems opens with “A Mouth for Picket Fences” in which we witness a stranger walking into town and getting along famously with the majority of the residents. Unbeknownst to the townspeople, this man brings with him an evil presence that he scatters throughout the town, thus altering their normal lives into darker, more sinister affairs. These poems deal with the nature of evil, the supernatural and the human tendency to spiral into madness when confronted with the unknown.
Part 3: (in)Humanity: This group of poems shows the acts and tendencies people are capable of when exposed to evil or simply some of the darker corners of life. To some, there is a degree of sorrow but the majority of these people have forfeited their lives of normalcy to the darkness and have graciously accepted their inhuman sides.
What they’re saying about A Mouth For Picket Fences:
“Things left unsaid resonate throughout Napier’s poems and remind us that the darkness within speaks volumes about who we are and how we communicate with the daily mysteries of life.”
- Constance Brewer, co-editor – Everyday Poets
“A Mouth for Picket Fences showcases Barry Napier’s unique voice and maturing skill as a poet. His is a name worth watching, and A Mouth for Picket Fences is a collection worth reading.”
-Brian Hatcher, Shroud Magazine
“In this collection, Napier moves confidently from “the nebular of a hayfield” to “a chapped madness.” Do not expect to know what comes next as Napier skillfully carries us from poem to poem.”
-Kelli Russel Agodon, author of Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room
Excerpt:
A Mouth For Picket Fences
Porch lights flickered when he arrived.
Dogs slunk their shoulders,
whimpered and left piss trails behind them
as they crawled away to hide.
He came to town in a car
with wheels like rotary blades
that sounded like church bells when they struck the curb.
He made friends with the men.
He made their wives shudder in want
and ache in knowing that they could not have.
He had a mind for community.
He had eyes for immaculate homes
and a mouth for picket fences.
Even now he is luring the children out of their beds
with promises of dreams fulfilled
of responsibilities forsaken
of clocks that misplace minutes and truths
and gods that require no worship.
He makes his way through town,
through each avenue and street,
through the abandoned mills and lumber yards
and he knocks on every door.
His hand has never touched a single door knob
but he has been inside each home.
He knows the violence and heat of their bedrooms
and the malice and spite in every two-car garage.
He understands the weaknesses of muscle and spirit
and has studied what tempts the flesh and twists the mind.
He knows of family dinners,
of husbands and wives
of children playing in the dark
of sin and salvation
of Adam and Eve
of Cain, of Abel
and of the love that binds
and kills them all.
Barry Napier has had more than 30 short stories and poems published in print and online. He is the author of the short fiction collection Debris and the chapbook The Final Study of Cooper M. Reid. His first novel, The Bleeding Room, will be published by Graveside Tales in 2011. He lives in Lynchburg, VA with his wife and two children.
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