Family, Feelings, Play, Politics, and Holy War

Jack Cargill has selected these poems from hundreds written mostly since 1993, and has grouped them roughly under several themes. The opening section includes meditations on family and home (Texas) - generational relations, deaths, living in "exile." A catch-all "Feelings and Observations" section offers poems on social phenomena, nature, friendships, movies, music, and various other topics. A series of whimsical and humorous poems follows. The final section - "Politics, War, Religion, and Fatal Combinations Thereof" - presents Cargill's reactions to the brutalities of the contemporary American economy and society, and to a world increasingly gone mad. Sanctimonious abuses of power and murderous invocations of religion draw his special ire, and sometimes his mordantly humorous contempt.