Steven Turrill

A lot of bad things happening at once Steven Turrill

A collection of two previously unpublished chapbooks, "landfilling" and "days don't get tired of coming," from 2008 and 2010, respectively, a lot of bad things happening at once begins the author's excavation of lost work from the past decade. The pieces in "landfilling" were written during and inspired by a particular low point of a writer's block while the poet struggled through a great depression amid the Great Recession. He turned to methods of blackout and found poetry. He labored over a span of years on only a few lines. The source material is lost, but included news articles, The Spoon River Anthology, and original work published in the undergraduate journals from which his own work was rejected. Here he begins an exploration of some of his favorite themes-death, family, sex, mythology, childhood, metaphysics, language, violence, and heartbreak. In "days don't get tired of coming," a cast of unnamed players speak to the camera, or in voice-over, or to themselves, in persona poems. One or two of the personae is the poet himself. Inspired by his move to Appalaichan Ohio, where the voices the poet heard in the countryside, away from the cities he had spent all of his life in, made useful masks for exploring more conversational and colloquial rhythms and form.