PICTURE WINDOW - Danny Caine
ABOUT THE BOOK
Danny Caine is struggling to adapt to new fatherhood when the Covid-19 pandemic upends, well, everything. All of a sudden, the glorious world he hoped to share with his son has shrunk, at times composing not much more than his rented house in Kansas and the small parking lot across the street. Denied access to Elsewhere, Caine begins to grapple with the concept of "home." The question gains new urgency when two things happen: Caine's childhood home is sold, and Caine's family is forced into an excruciating long-distance living arrangement. With mostly short, sometimes-surreal poems, Picture Window attempts (and maybe fails) to define "home" in an era when the future is uncertain and everything feels a little bit off.
PRAISE FOR PICTURE WINDOW
"A friend said, ‘The one thing I wish everybody knew about poetry was that it doesn’t have to be 50,000 miles removed from real life.' For this friend – for everybody – I recommend Danny Caine’s poems. These poems are full of Six Flags and garbage bags, toddler care and Tupperware, chain restaurants with Italian names that aren’t really Italian. It’s a book you’ll want to pick up and read and smile at and think a minute and put down and do a chore and pick up again. Each poem is like a haiku but fatter. Each focuses on one little piece of ordinary life, and as your day flows by you so slowly that you barely notice it, each reminds you, as my favorite poem does, that ‘something / beautiful is happening.’”
—David Kirby, author of Help Me, Information
"When he isn’t braiding the dread of suburbia with the whimsy of humanity, Danny Caine becomes my favorite lonely traveller, a clever photographer of liminal spaces, bleak landscapes undercut by just the right amount of fast food trash. Give this book to every dad—no, every parent—no, every adult. Give this book to every wandering cynic who believes poetry has nothing to show them. Watch them read it. Watch them seeing, how the mind changes."
—Tyler Barton, author of Eternal Night at the Nature Museum
“I am of the utmost certainty that few poets see the curiosity of our world in as surreal a beauty as Danny Caine does. His newest collection, Picture Window, is yet another touchstone of his always far-reaching generosity. It is one thing to step into a writer’s world and feel its indescribable alchemy, but what a gift it is to enter that place walking hand-in-hand with the person who made it. Caine is with us in Picture Window the whole way, shouldering us across a landscape populated by abandoned Six Flags parks and Taco Bells, a gloaming fatherhood, and the always treacherous throes of I-480 that sometimes frustratingly spills into the jammed traffic of the North Coast. So indescribably Ohioan, I am in awe over how perfectly Caine articulates the land I grew up on, the cities I’ve long called home. What a treat to hold this book; what a joy to know there is surely, and thankfully, more to come.”
—Matt Mitchell, author of The Neon Hollywood Cowboy
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Danny Caine is the author of the poetry collections Continental Breakfast, El Dorado Freddy's, Flavortown, and Picture Window, as well as the book How to Resist Amazon and Why. His poetry has appeared in The Slowdown, LitHub, DIAGRAM, Hobart, and Barrelhouse, and his prose has appeared in LitHub and Publishers Weekly. The Midwest Independent Booksellers Association awarded him the 2019 Midwest Bookseller of the Year award. He's a co-owner of the Raven Book Store, Publishers Weekly's 2022 bookstore of the year.
BOOK INFO
Pub Date: Jan 31 2023
Print Length: 94 pages
Dimensions: 5.25 x 8 inches
ISBN: 978-1-957392-13-4