"The best writers are those who inspire me to write like they do. Whitman affected me this way, and Dickinson did, and so did T.S. Eliot. Reading Curtis L. Crisler's Doing Drive-bys on How to Love in the Midwest, I want to make his wild one-of-a-kind poetic voice my own, and I want to write about what he writes about, the world that needs to be written about, the world ignored by too many people, the world of brutality against the good people deprived of justice and love."

-John Guzlowski, author of Echoes of Tattered Tongues

"If you've ever wondered what it means to be a poet writing in the Midwest, wonder and wander no longer. Doing Drive-bys on How to Love in the Midwest is about loving, losing, and honoring the moments of life we do have. Curtis L. Crisler writes with an "urban Midwestern sensibility," that takes us in and out of April snow, an IHOP, the white and black of Indiana. Even more than that, this poet, in poems that move with breath and jazz across the page, asks us to consider what it means to be human, to really be human, when Black lives are being lost at an alarming rate, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Emmitt Till, when a global pandemic swallows us whole, when death comes too soon. In "Fifty Something Years of Letters Laters," the poet imagines a world where Emmett Till had lived and says: If she would not have lied / it's also possible I would not be thankful. Here we should stand up and clap for the wisdom of this aging speaker-his perspective on this life, now, in this place, holds us accountable to find all the 'beautiful things' that will break our hearts."

-Sarah Sandman, author of The Sinew of 47 Years and I Speak Moan

"Listen: If you manage to put down Curtis L. Crisler's Doing Drive-bys on How to Love in the Midwest for even a minute-and I don't believe you can-you had best bury that sucker under a collected Shakespeare or a ten-pound anvil. Otherwise, this man's poems are liable to jump right up off the page and dance, so infused are they with righteous rhythms. But the moves aren't just for show. Crisler is after the heart and the hurt inside the contemporary experience. And so, he puts capital-R "Reality" on direct notice: there is some serious shit going on here we need to discuss."

-Justin Hamm, author of Drinking Guinness With the Dead

"All the feels I've ever felt about what it means to live and love and lay claim to the Midwest are expressed in Curtis L. Crisler's poetry. This is what it is to be seen. From the laments for George and Breonna and all the others we have never known, to the contemplation of corporeal and material ruin, to the excavation of passions dug down deep-all is laid bare here. Doing Drive-bys on How to Love in the Midwest is not just another addition to a stunning oeuvre. It is a message, a critical intervention, a rapturous ode to a way of being."

-Terrion L. Williamson, Director, Black Midwest Initiative, & Associate Professor, Black Studies and Gender and Women's Studies

Publisher: C&r Press

Pub date: 2023-12-31

Length: 108 pages