Concrete Wolf: Two Chapbook Issue

This is a Special Issue containing two complete poetry chapbooks, Put Your Sorry Side out by Loise Marie Harrod and The Way Out West by J.R. Thelin. Lois Marie Harrod’s collection, Put Your Sorry Side Out, offers a refreshing look at the world through the eyes of her entertaining and earnest characters Aunt Eurydice, Alice Ann and Marlene Mae. Unsentimental and unapologetic, these poems feel like thought snapshots taken in the midst of typically uncelebrated events like cleaning up after elderly pack rat relatives, secretaries writing on bathroom stalls and gas stations blowing up. J. R. Thelin’s The Way Out West travels through time and distance with equal grace. Thelin is our tour guide pointing out closed-down drive-in theatres, two headed rattlesnakes, fruit stands and tumbleweed. Through Thelin we feel the gearshift in hand, the desert around us, and the enormous sky looming overhead. Meeting truck drivers and stopping at roadside diners, we realize that what we fail to notice could be swallowed up by the vastness all around.