In Soot, Joe Betz gives us a landscape both Midwestern and mystical, as in touch with the land as a “mother’s snow boots / black and waxed with salt and tar,” but also ethereal, dreamlike, surreal. Here we have the violence of boys, “their fists dense with nickel rolls,” and the silent griefs and sufferings of men and women, but this is also a place of hope, where “one dreams of nets // both filled with fish and also swish,” where love sometimes allows us to “push past half- / beliefs to something true.” For a long time I have read Joe Betz‘s poems with awe and admiration—it is a gift to have them gathered in this marvelous collection.
–Mark Neely
The poems of Joe Betz‘s remarkable Soot test the human spirit against a hard-edged landscape. This is a collection that simultaneously holds together the destructive and the decent. Describing a punch, Betz writes “Pleasure//is the hook dense as cold molasses.” Praising spring, Betz suggests, “Believe no one who says we’ve nothing to learn from a bee’s dance.” There’s heavy loss in these pages, but there’s also growth—growth of children and of orchards and of the speaker. In this way, Soot is an argument for survival—for recognizing that, yes, ours is a sometimes-brutal world, but it’s still a world worthy of our admiration.
–Keith Leonard
I’ve loved Joe’s work for more than a decade, and in his debut chapbook, my dear friend performs miracles in reverent lyricism. Here surrealism soars with a beer crushed in its raptor’s beak, and beneath the soot, bright bone sings, hollers, cheers.
–Ron Austin
“The poems in Joe Betz‘s SOOT remind me of the lightning bugs I occasionally see summers here in Indiana: literally pulsing with energy. “Look(!),” they say, all staccato and grace, “here I am, illuminating this landscape for you, won’t you stay for a spell?” They buzz until you blush. Full of tenderness, sharp observations, cardinals, and bumblebees, this chapbook joins the Midwestern canon of literature tracing our lineage and asking important questions, like, what are we doing, specifically, here(?), and, how can I leave this land bettered for the next generation(?). I don’t know how many copies Finishing Line is planning to print, but it better be enough to hand out to every vehicle entering Indiana for a good season or two.”
–Doug Paul Case
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