The award-winning poet returns to his homeplace in the Pacific Northwest, where the neighborhood simmers with the chemical presence of human trouble and sparks of beauty coexist with danger.
This image-driven, sound-driven collection carries us to the working-class Portland neighborhood of Lents, where Dickman was raised by a single mother. Here, as a skateboarding boy practices his kickflip on the street, enlightenment simmers under the surface of both the natural world and the human constructions that threaten it. The rivers shrinking to a trickle, the unaddressed crisis of homelessness, the drug use in a local park: these run side by side with the efforts and structures of families, created mostly by working mothers, with their jumbled bottomless purses and full-time jobs; Dickman’s own mother worked at the power company of the title, PP&L. His exquisite, ultrareal narratives take us down through these layers, illuminating the way we’ve treated and should treat one another, seeking integrity and understanding in the midst of a broken world.
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Michael Dickman’s Pacific Power & Light possesses a cumulative effect where small, fragmented moments culminate. The title works on the reader’s psyche as a subplot; yes, we remember what happened in Paradise and Dixie. The poet names seemingly routine moments of everyday lives, but the astute reader knows these collective details linger in the heart of America. The poet’s imagistic symbols and emblems create a postmodern intrigue, as one stands in daily humdrum. Dickman paints a portrait—moments that make us happy or sad—beckoning us into a psychological weather. Pacific Power & Light’s knowing ellipses color a fiery backdrop.
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Yusef Komunyakaa, author of Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth