Waiting on Hummingbirds

"Waiting on Hummingbirds, the latest dual poetry joint by Jason Baldinger and James Benger, is a bold and sympathetic meditation on the wrack, rumble, and backroad precariousness found in the protoplasm of American experience. A read I heartily recommend." -John Burroughs, 2022-2023 U.S. Beat Poet Laureate"In lyric poems and ballads, Benger and Baldinger pay homage to the gritty, black and white life of stuckness that plays out in single wides, 3rd shifts and temp work. Here, the king of childhood bites off the head of a mouse. The first Halloween costume is Dad's clothes and empty gunbelt, "There, you're a cowboy," heading into a "real neighborhood" of "a city-ordained septic tank/and mailboxes." This is tender witness of lower case saturdays and the slow passing of time when finally, "we start to look like our mothers/pre-dawn, lap full of guitar/metronome clicking 'til/a freight train derails/has anyone else noticed/the drop ceiling they installed in the sky?"-Karen Schubert, "author of The Compost Reader""Imagine yourself in the backseat of a beater, a sodium-lit highway, an overnight road trip with two friends whose stories are each more fluent, more deft and tender in turn. That gets to some of what I felt while reading Waiting on Hummingbirds. These profound, observant, humane poems occasionally shook me like rumble strips, startling with a suddenness of feeling, an exclamation of surprise. At the end of my reading, I returned to the first page and began again. The landscapes and lives Baldinger and Benger move through invite revisiting, hold out to us who may, ourselves, feel like strays, "an offering / a small good thing / to bring the rain." -Jennifer Browne, American Crow