Author: Theresa Smalec

A place for unfinished things and Forty-some-odd on by Joe Amato

Cars are vehicles of memory. This inaugural installment of “Car Poems” features two poems by Joe Amato, written roughly forty years apart. Amato considers the gifts that others passed on to him by means of cars, and ponders the future of such transmissions. *** A place for unfinished things c. 1974 If looks could kill that day would have killed me. It was cold out our refrigerator was half empty and as full as it had been in months and my fingers were numb. The garbage can was singed around the outside my fingers were numb and nearly black...

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Car Poems: A Collective Vehicle

Call for Poetry “For nearly all of the first century of automobile travel, getting your license meant liberation from parental control, a passport to the open road. Today, only half of millennials bother to get their driver’s licenses by age 18. Car culture, the 20th-century engine of the American Dream, is an old guy’s game.” –Marc Fisher, “Cruising Toward Oblivion.” “I’ve never seen myself as a ‘girl driver.’ I’m just a driver.” –Danica Patrick “I wasn’t reaching for it.” –Last words of Philando Castile, 1983-2016 Like the intersections implicit in Politics/Letters, cars perform at the crossroads of America’s aesthetic,...

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