Two Towns Over

"It is not hyperbole to call Darren Demaree's Two Towns Over a game-changer. In these dazzling, risk-taking poems, Demaree drags us through the small towns of Ohio, towns ravaged by drugs: 'They are taking/ all of Ohio. It's a burial/ of the living.' This Ohio has been poisoned grotesque, and yet, thanks to this poet's empathetic eye and gallows humor, it is still beautifully redeemable. It is home: 'All fire/ & water, / these people/ my people.'"

--Maggie Smith, author of Good Bones