Ron Koertge & Charles Harper Webb read from and sign Yellow Moving Van & Sidebend World

Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - 7:00pm at Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena

PHOTO: Ron Koertge | SouthPasadenan.com

Ron Koertge’s Yellow Moving Van is a collection of relaxed and buoyant and sometimes very funny poems that address Desi & Lucy with the same courtesy as Walt Whitman. The author celebrates his roots in the Mid-West and a few pages later stops off in Transylvania. These poems like to sometimes embrace and sometimes confound expectations, and they all stand together as enemies of the murky and pompous. There is apparently no subject — Prometheus, a fifty foot woman, or Death himself — that is unwilling to fall under his spell. (University of Pittsburgh Press)

Webb is celebrated for his use of humor; yet even his funniest poems rise, as the best humor must, from serious concerns. Powered by an uncompromising but compassionate intelligence and an abiding wonder at the beautiful strangeness of the world, Sidebend World explores with clarity and vividness a wide range of emotions–love to hate, tenderness to brutality; yet, above all, Webb is a poet of praise. Metaphors of startling aptness and originality, a distinctive voice at once provocative and endearing, high musicality, propulsive energy, wild imaginative leaps, as well as mastery of diction from lyricism to street-speak, create a reading experience of the first order. These poems go down easy, but pack a wallop. As Robert Frost said poetry should do, Sidebend World “begins in delight and ends in wisdom.” (University of Pittsburgh Press)