Release the Hounds
Misty Cosgrove
About the Author
Misty Cosgrove has a long history of being successful at life. She’s taken home the first place ribbon at the Georgia State Fair Chili Cook Off, TWICE, and is currently the reigning Champion of the Women’s Southeast Division Mud Wrestling Association. This is her first book of poetry.
“Cormac McCarthy once opined that he wrote few women characters because he did not understand them. Misty Cosgrove’s poetry provides the voices that McCarthy’s novels lack, while providing a similar aesthetic. Each poem has a great sense of time and place, but still manages to tap into the universal. Misty provides us with a litany of grotesqueries and casual atrocities, but never fails to provide some hope scraped from the bottom of the barrel. I can think of no one better suited to provide empathy for both martyrs and monsters, and isn’t that what literature is for?”
—Neil McCrea, author of Wisdom & Dust
ISBN 978-0-9892018-8-9
92 pages
$14.95
5.5" x 8.5" perfect bound, paper
Excerpt
Floyd’s Barber Shop
I pitched enough fits
to win a seat in the Buick
and go along for the ride
into town.
I waited inside a dual exhaust steel cage
while my brother and Daddy
rubbed elbows with the elite members
of the (We have a penis and you don’t) club.
Killing time consisted of sniffing
empty packs of smokes
while holding a Phillips Head screwdriver
between my legs and imagining my conversation
with Floyd.
“Afternoon Floyd,
I’m just needing a trim.”
“Sorry baby girl,
you have to have a penis
to be in here with us.”
“What the Hell do you call this?”
*shaking the Phillips Head up and down
Between my legs.*
“Oh, my apologies. Please, come sit
in chair number three, right between your
father and brother. I’ll have you fixed up
in no time.”
Before I could imagine my new haircut
my Daddy opened the car door
and hollered at me to hop in the back
and let my brother ride up front.
Reviews
“In Misty Cosgrove's writing – as within our dreams – no figure or fragment is incidental or without meaning. Consequently, entire stories emerge with just a few essential words or gestures: We glimpse a man’s past and future in a moment of silent chivalry for a sex doll; we witness a woman’s lifetime of violence through the quiet washing of a dress on a porch.
Cosgrove stares unflinchingly into the hearts and bowels of her subjects and records with charm and imagination, though without false sentiment, everything telling that she observes. There is pain in the humour and humour in the pain. A woman has laid herself bare for us, laid her people bare, and in turn she has unveiled a nation. Cosgrove has invited us into her America – an America whose death rattle is indistinguishable from riotous laughter.”
—Clement Piedra, enigma