Vertical Hold

In Jeff Simspon’s first collection of poetry, Vertical Hold, people, things, and situations change as frequently and dynamically as the weather of the Great Plains, a place where cold fronts barrel down from Canada and ride up over moisture-laden warm fronts from Mexico to engender Coke bottle-green skies, chaotic winds, and sometimes, tornadoes. But Vertical Hold delivers the seemingly changeless local element, too, a necessity when portraying a place such as Oklahoma with its Boomer Sooner families, tight-knit small-town dys- and functional communities, and allegiance to TV, football, bar-b-que, dominoes, and stag parties. Thus, unresolvable tensions between change and stasis, between jazz-like postmodernism and folk-like regionalism, underlie this tight, gutsy, and impressive collection that was a finalist for the National Poetry Series before being published by Steel Toe Books in 2011.