Local Color

If there was an official poet laureate of the West, Don Thompson would be my choice. For four decades he has reminded us what it means to be alive out here, coping with a world we do not fully understand. In Local Color, he employs an original format to present, as usual, wonderful word-pictures. Also as usual, "place" is a character in his work, but not just any place: the south San Joaquin with all its peculiarities and wonders. No writer has seen more there or told more telling tales as a result. This is narrative poetry that really narrates
-Gerald Haslam, author of Straight White Male and Leon Patterson: a California Story

Author: Don Thompson
Publisher: Aldrich Press
Published: 02/05/2014
Pages: 188
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.57lbs
Size: 9.02h x 5.98w x 0.40d
ISBN: 9780615954257

About the Author
Like both the night watchman and the editor, the two voices of Local Color, Don Thompson is a native of Bakersfield, California, and has lived in the southern San Joaquin Valley for most of his life. He began publishing poetry in the early sixties, producing a number of books and chapbooks over the years. Back Roads: A Journal won the 2008 Sunken Garden Poetry Prize. Most of his work interacts with the landscape of the Valley, but in Local Color he turns to the history of the region, to the people as well as the place. Thompson and his wife, Chris, live on her family's farm-land once owned by Miller and Lux, who reclaimed it, and before that, of course, by the Yokut, who hunted and fished the original wetlands.

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