Surreal Expulsion’s title poem responds not only bluntly to the 2018 mass shooting that left seventeen dead at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School but ultimately to the socio-political negligence and indifference behind violence and injustice worldwide. In assorted other blasts D. R. James confronts contemporary issues and personal skirmishes against “sapient insufficiency” through free verse and hijacked forms (prose poem, cento, sonnet, villanelle), arresting images and twisted wit, exposé and surreality. In toto, the collection wrestles, now soberly, now sardonically, with strains of “barbarity, barrels of it” as well as of “the calm shadowy fraud.”
Advance Praise for Surreal Expulsion:
D. R. James’s Surreal Expulsion does not close itself to the events of our historical moment, but invites them into the “fortress of language” to work their “eccentric twisting in the inexplicable path.” With textured lines and crackling diction, these poems register our nervous collective pulse.
—Ellen McGrath Smith, editor of Bullets into Bells, author of Scatter, Feed and Nobody’s Jackknife
The poems in Surreal Expulsion are both topical and wise as they address the human condition, and they deftly walk the line between gravitas and levity. They wake the mind and ask us to consider our place among the masses; as verbal amuse-bouches, they feel good in the mouth and ask to be savored.
—Sonia Greenfield, editor of Rise Up Review,author of American Parable
These poems of resistance pluck an activist’s strings most intimately. Cry out, if you must, rend your clothes, gnash your teeth to stubs, lament like a Scotch-Irish ballad, but they will have you know: these abominations are ours, “in a language we now must teach across America.” They are a call to action. How will you respond?
—Kit-Bacon Gressitt, publisher / founding editor of Writers Resist(online) and Writers Resist Anthology 2018
D. R. James's seven previous poetry collections include If god were gentle (Dos Madres Press 2017), Since Everything Is All I've Got (March Street Press 2011), and the chapbooks Split-Level and Why War (both Finishing Line Press 2017 and 2014). Poems and prose appear in various print and online journals, including Bullets into Bells, Caring Magazine, Coe Review, Diner, Dunes Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Friends of William Stafford Newsletter, Galway Review, HEArt Online, Hotel Amerika, Ithaca Lit, North Dakota Quarterly, Passager, Rattle, Rise Up Review, The Sow's Ear Poetry Review, Sycamore Review, and The Writer's Chronicle; and anthologies, including Ritual to Read Together: Poems in Conversation with William Stafford (Woodley 2013) and Poetry in Michigan / Michigan in Poetry (New Issues 2013). James has been teaching writing, literature, and peace-making at a small college for 34 years and lives in the woods outside of Saugatuck, Michigan, with his wife, psychotherapist Suzy Doyle. Between them they have six grown children, four grandchildren, and two cats.
