Patti White

Patti White was raised in the military; she has now lived in eleven states, some of them twice. She studied intergroup relations at the University of Kentucky, then moved to Colorado to do pre-sentence investigations for the Fourth Judicial District courts. She returned to school to study contemporary narrative and literary theory, and now teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Alabama, where she also serves as director of Slash Pine Press. Her work has appeared in a number of journals, including Iowa Review, River Styx, North American Review, Forklift Ohio, New Madrid, Mississippi Review, and Gulf Coast. In 2001, she received the Anhinga Prize for Poetry for Tackle Box(published by Anhinga Press in 2002); an award-winning festival-short film of the title poem was released in late 2003. Chain Link Fence, was published in 2013. Her most recent book, Pink Motel, was released in May 2017.

PINK MOTEL BY PATTI WHITE
$20.00

"You hold in your hands the map for a sumptuous wander. And you are promised the ocean. Promised crackers cracking almost like bones. Promised trickster maps and miasmic roads and dryads. Via relentless tinkering with the interiors of the mind. Via apocalyptic tectonics. Like Browning’s Childe Roland, Patti White’s Lucy comes nose to nose with the central questions of any quest: is she fit to see; fit to fail; succeed; move even? I am moved to observe that every hole opened along the way overwells and overbrims to flooding with White’s clipped and kinetic music. You will be haunted — gaunt and lonesome some. But just like the ocean wallows forever in every shell, Patti White’s etched, exacting image-making will sound and spellbind you long after."  — Abraham Smith

PINK MOTEL BY PATTI WHITE $20.00

CITROPHILIA

A yellow moon spinning in orbit. A night under stars like blossoms, hillsides fogged with pollen, the groves shadowed and sweet. How that air fell on the skin like a lover’s breath, she thinks, how leaves glittered in the headlights as she swept across the state. The spack spack spack of insects against the windshield. A flash of black water or a plastic bag in the ditch. At the end of the road an airplane or an ocean, wire baskets of lemons on counters, glass pitchers stirred with simple syrup, her heart a poetry of rind and pulp. Lucy keeps a map of Florida in her car just in case and when the weatherman calls for an eclipse she waits outside and watches, remembers mist rising from the road like smudgepots in winter, high winds behind the storms, a wildfire of armadillos blazing through the groves. 

CHAIN LINK FENCE
BY PATTI WHITE
$18.00 (email us for availability)

A catastrophic post-pastoral, nightmared and sung by a tornadic imagination. Chain Link Fence offers "plot" as "a series of shapes, a choreography." And here the dream replaces our dreamer, "an eggshell of / air around the world, a crust of salt, / the sphere of her eye quivering, un- / able to take it all in." White's linkage of luminescent image trades in visions rather than narratives. -- Peter Streckfus

YELLOW JACKETS
BY PATTI WHITE
$14.00. (email us for availability)

Patti White's new book, Yellow Jackets, is wildly ventriloquistic. Where else would you find sumo wrestlers, Izzy the cat, King Louis the Child, Jimmy Hoffa, the residents of Thicketty, South Carolina, couples at their burnt-out ends, and yellow jackets in one collection? All empathetically expressed, and without a single repeat. If you're bored with books about what the poet ate for breakfast, this one, with its refreshing lack of ego and its generously associated images is surely worth a look. -- Lola Haskins

Praise for Tackle Box, also by Patti White: Patti White's voice is authoritative, witty, and persuasive. She can take the most trivial subject and give it substance through her imaginative vision... To read these poems is to be invigorated, to feel the possibility of moving outside the confines of one's own narrow personal life. But dynamic vision is not all White offers. Her language is radiant, intensely lyrical at times, in spite of its driving narrative force. Perhaps that is why they seem to be the poems of some Wonder Woman or High Priestess, or the kind of woman we would all be honored to know. -- Diane Wakoski (Judge, 2001 Anhinga Prize for Poetry)

TACKLE BOX
BY PATTI WHITE
$12.00 (email us for availability)

Robert Dana-Anhinga Prize for Poetry (2001)

These poems are the best lures I've picked up in a long time. No - they've picked me up. Patti White can talk tough, but be oh so embraceable. -- Gary Gildner

These poems offer a unique perception of the world, almost primal in their energy and power but, also couched in the sophistication of global myth and literature. Patti White's voice is authoritative, witty, and persuasive. She can take the most trivial subject and give it substance through her imaginative vision. Like a shaman, she offers reverence for life and the living, but this is no soft-focus new age shaman afraid to touch blood or penetrate mysteries. To read these poems is to be invigorated, to feel the possibility of moving outside the confines of one's own narrow personal life. But dynamic vision is not all White offers. Her language is radiant, intensely lyrical at times, in spite of its driving narrative force. Perhaps that is why they seem to be the poems of some Wonder Woman or High Priestess, or the kind of woman we would all be honored to know. -- Diane Wakoski