WE DROVE ALL NIGHT: A Red Shuttleworth Poetry Chapbook

We Drove All Night

 poetry

by

Red Shuttleworth

(Three-Time Spur Award Winning Poet)

Available from Finishing Line Press or Amazon

Praise for We Drove All Night:

"If you've ever, like me, wished for poems that move more like outlaws than academics, that know their whiskey, their weather, their women, poems where llamas eat family cats and girls have "I'll console you breasts," poems that hurtle down long dirt roads, "always speeding toward days we're unrehearsed for," hard won poems governed by discipline, a singular music, and the sweet salt of living to the hilt, We Drove All Night is just your speed.  Red Shuttleworth is big hearted and wild; an American original."

     Louise Mathias, Lark Apprentice

"The territory in We Drove All Night --from Steve McQueen to rodeo strippers, from Geronimo-moonlight trains on desolation prairies to motel pools at freeway edges-- is so beautifully realized you'll want to put down restless roots between the lines.  Shuttleworth is a treasure."

     Susan Compo, Warren Oates: A Wild Life

"Red Shuttleworth's Sam Peckinpah-esque imagery and lingo metaphorically stirs those Wild Bunch Gatling gun, Colt .45, Winchester carbine scenes from which the explosiveness and smoke of language never settles in our imaginations, our fantasies, our illusions come real.  We're talking slow-motion bullets crossed with time-lapse-fast ballet resulting in a hybrid poetic vigor to the umpteenth soulful power.  We're talking a vision and voice that would have moved a sober Charles Bukowski to tears of joy over the discovery that he did not, in fact, orbit this poetic solar system alone.  However, We Drove All Night is not so much a book of poems as it is, again, a projected reel of motion picture frames.  Read the script.  Listen to the score.  Watch the movie and dance "the dance of reckless abandon" with a cast of characters never before choreographed.  Take a pull from Red Shuttleworth's fifth of private stock Literary Elixer, his music juice, and it will take  you on an all-night-drive word journey, sans gravitational pull -seat belts, head lights, road maps, speed limits, and double-yellow lines be damned."

     Paul Zarzyski (four-time Spur Award winner), 51: 30 Poems, 20 Lyrics, 1 Self-Interview