The Mining Camps of the Mouth

George Kalamaras' THE MINING CAMPS OF THE MOUTH is the winner of the DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press 2012 Chapbook Contest. In The Mining Camps of the Mouth, George Kalamaras's newest book, we encounter a poet "who dares to write location--and not just about location." Kalamaras tramps over the most tramped-over area as cultural ideal in American life--the West. With the aid of grave witchers who dowse up corpses, he untombs lives never mentioned in the history books, mining camp prostitutes for one. To these unheralded lives, he adds his memories of his dog Barney, the poet Gene Frumkin, and a "Dream in Which Frank Waters Is My Mother" where Waters tells him "it's easier to grieve than to mouth the sound of now." This book, which ends with an astute send-up of cultural criticism, continues and enriches this important poet's explorations of subjectivity and the discourses it drives, including history, as he "mouths the sound of now. --Roger Mitchell Kalamaras laurels that part of freedom which knows no bounds except the crime of love. Read him sideways, read him backwards. This is the mouth of a cannon that fires at all conventional assumptions. --Alvaro Cardona-Hine