EDITOR’S NOTES
Come Back to the Dollar General, Harry Dean, Harry Dean!!!
“These poems of Jason Ryberg’s are part Midwestern everyman and surreal cosmic traveler. They come from rural front porches, restless dreams, backroads that lead nowhere, smoke hazed living rooms with yellow lightbulbs, and places where beer is served in brown paper bags. They defi ne death and cure hangovers. They listen to baseball and basketball games on old and often sentimental pocket radios. They smoke their own meat and smoke Chesterfield cigarettes. They sit and think and drink, and they cruise small town streets looking for their next diner, next dive bar, next drink, next myth and legend to embrace. This collection is one that you’ll read more than once, finding new answers each time, to questions that you haven’t yet asked.”
Dan Denton
Former UAW Chief Steward and Author of Fight Songs for the Underdogs (Luchador Press)
“Step right up, folks, and take your seats for Jason Ryberg’s grand opera, Come Back to the Dollar General, Harry Dean, Harry Dean!, whose dramatis personae includes mad scientists, frogs, Freud, aging hipsters, Ahab, Scarlatti, grizzly bears, Elvis, coyotes, goats, the Ventures, Li Po, your buddy Pico, buzzards, roosters, barbers, El Greco, Walt Whitman, Death, Monk, and “butterflies, butterflies, butterflies.” You’ll thrill as the curtains pull back revealing highway after highway, an abandoned rock quarry, a back-porch swing, a front-porch LA-Z-BOY, a gas station just outside of St. John, Kansas, a hole-in-the-wall bar, your landlord’s kitchen table, a motel room, a rowboat, a park bench, another motel room, and you, finally, waking up in a car by the side of the road. Jason Ryberg has composed a mad music both contemporary and timeless, nostalgic and restless, haunted and heartbroken, and when the house lights finally come back up the ushers will have to pry you from your seats with a Slim Jim. Never fear, because A. you can snag another ticket and hear it all again, and B. the sun’s about to split the horizon and “somewhere, birds are starting to sing.”
-Christopher Citro
Author of If We Had a Lemon We’d Throw It and Call That the Sun
south broadway press 