Eating Raw Meat

About this book

In Eating Raw Meat, g emil reutter proclaims, "I stand on the rubble that is left / of the American dream"; looking out from that prospect, he tells us, "I think of the hard working class." Yet, even as these poems show us hard labor and trashed dreams, reutter affirms how close attention to those lives and to the natural world serves to redeem us on this "beautiful brutal blue planet." "I work the / garden the way I work a poem," he tells us; and, centered among existences, "I ... listen to what they say, watch what they do and write what I can." This attention results in poems of integrity and of beauty: "rhythm / of rain, cadence of thunder, lyrical / hissing of wind."-Nathalie F. Anderson Alexander Griswold Cummins Professor of English Literature and Director of the Program in Creative Writing Swarthmore College