Dancing Room Only

Dancing Room Only: New and Selected Poems gathers work by Jim Reese, a poet with a Midwestern sensibility who writes like a well-traveled troubadour. The poems head into the overlooked heart of ordinary American life and catalog the sinners and saints who haunt the Midwest and places beyond it.

Reese writes in a rollicking voice with plenty of humor and a sharp ear for dialect and speech. Everyday scenes involving children and neighbors carry a current of menace under the warmth, so that the poems read as both praise and warning, mixing love with a hint of violence.

The book draws on his three earlier collections of poetry, alongside new work.