The Other Side of Broadway: Selected Poems 1965-2005 by A.D. Winans. Presa Press (132pgs.) $18.00

When I was a young poet, in my late teens, I'd find myself wandering the stacks of the county library devouring any book I came to fancy. Back then the library had a decent poetry section. Probably from the time I'd gotten my first library card I'd begun to educate myself about poetry and poetics by working my way through the card catalog of this very section. But it wasn't until I discovered poets of what I came to know as the "Meat" school that I felt like I found my kindreds. Among them of course, was A.D. Winans. A battered copy of Carmel Clowns situated on the bottom shelf near the end of the poetry stacks caught my eye. I don't know why it caught my eye. The volume was in pretty bad shape, and I think my subsequent reading of it finally retired the volume. But my reading of it was a marvel. The man wrote from a place of honesty -- and with such an attitude, as if he didn't care what people thought. So many poets I had read wrote from a place of moral cowardice. Somehow, reading Winans and other writers redefined for me what a poem could be and set me on a new path. So, I suppose it is kismit that I am now, twenty years later, reviewing a volume of Winans' selected work.

This volume represents some of the author's better poems written over the course of forty years. The poems are divided into seven category sections: Cityscapes, Poets & Poetry, Jazz, Family, Women, Politics, and Looking Back/Reflections. Each section has its own appeal. The man doesn't waste words or a reader's time with complicated word games. His lines come at you bare-knuckled and hit just as hard. In "Remembering My Grandmother" the poet compares old people to "wasted corpses/on a 24-hour pass from the morgue." In "Panama Memories," a poem about his army days, Winans compares having sex with a prostitute with "a mechanic working/on a used car." In "Poem for Jack Micheline," he declares that poetry has gone "the way of grand slams/ con games and cheap scams..." I read these lines and I find myself nodding my head in agreement. How many poets under thirty even know who Jack Micheline was? Or D.A. Levy. Or William Wantling? Winans' imagery is precise and he spouts his truth without fear or shame. In this respect he's more like a gunslinger than a poet and he always hits what he aims at.

There is something here for everyone, whether Winans' is calling for poets to "forget about a career in poetry and concentrate on the poem," or declaring that he will "not pledge allegiance/ to the flag of the U.S./ and everything it does/not stand for," he remains over the span of four decades the man who put the meat in meat poetry.

--reviewed by JCE