Exhibit 1.2.26

Blasphemous Country Classics

"I Believe in You"

Well, I dont believe that heaven waits
For only those who congregate
I'd like to think of God as love
He's down below
He's up above

Don Williams: unitarian/pro-baby.


"If Heaven Ain't a Lot Like Dixie"


If heaven ain't a lot like Dixie, I'd just as soon stay home.
If they don't have a Grand Ole Opry, like they do in Tennessee,
Just send me to hell or New York City, it would be about the same to me.

No one tell American Civil Rights Hero Charlie Pride how Bocephus feels.

Exhibit 27.9

Radio

Here's how my life has changed since I discovered the Country Legends radio station:

* I now feel approximately ∞ times closer to George Jones.

* I have a close, personal relationship with Jesus. Also, Alabama.

* My definition of Country Music has been expanded to include anything I can imagine Robert Duvall having once heard, even if only in passing.

* My definition of Legend has been expanded to include Eddie Rabbit.

* When asked, I can give direction's to Texas's best two-step bar and politely suggest the questioner go on Thursday when there are margarita specials all night long.

* I hear "Ring of Fire" so often I hum it while doing unrelated tasks, like grading papers or hitting my head against a wall.

* Most of my time is spent writing letters to congress trying to get Charley Pride honored as a civil rights hero.

Exhibit 25.19

Run by Kim Gek Lin Short



I didn't know anything about this chapbook when I picked it up at AWP except that Jeremiah said I should buy it and offered a toy horse to close the deal. He'd come so far as a salesman since we shared a table at the last AWP. But he was right. About the chapbook. About the horse. About everything.

It's easy in the world of letterpressed and hand-sewn chapbooks to get caught up in the beauty of the physical object and let it overshadow the writing inside, but Run would be just as satisfying if it were xeroxed and stapled at Kinko's. It is a beautiful book, of course, but the story told through this series of prose poems is a shocking one of kidnapping and abuse and country music. It can do this:

Hand it over, it says, the knife in her purse. Her mother tells the police she knows where La La is: it is not a better place. She slices the sharp searches for the life the heat the wet they do not see. She slices a gash and sharps over it over it over it. Where is your daughter, they ask, naked with glasses on. They're visual. She can't show them because they're visual.

Yep. It's full of moments like this. Violence and dreams and capture and escape.

Pick it up here. O, and then there's this. Hmm...