ELDER MOUNTAIN: A JOURNAL OF OZARKS STUDIES: Notes on LIVE FREE OR CROAK

Live Free or Croak: Poems. By Larry Rogers. (Golden Antelope Press, 2017, Pp. 53)

 

As suggested by its title, this volume of poetry assumes a defiant and lively stance toward life. The author, who was “mostly raised in a potting shed trailer in the piney woods of west central Arkansas,” engages a wide variety of topics, such as a Peeping Tom, Vietnam, and Marlon Perkins’ genitals. Many of these poems display hardscrabble attitudes and realities often associated with Ozarkers, and several of the poems are set squarely in the region. In one of these, “A Horse-Drawn Cart with Car Tires for Wheels,” the narrator recounts seeing, in 1967, two young grieving widows riding in a horse-drawn cart to attend the funeral of their husbands, “two local boys” who had “died in Southeast Asia.”

"Book Notes" in Elder Mountain: A Journal of Ozark Studies Issue 8 (2018) p. 126.