Davenport takes you with him as he returns to the gasoline-soaked town where he grew up and the family murder that still haunts him.
PRAISE FOR MURDER ON GASOLINE LAKE
“Davenport’s language is lyrical, and his images are satisfyingly edgy. He’s a first-rate artist who doesn’t pull his punches. He lets the sentiments lie where they always should in between the lines.”
— DUFF BRENNA
author of The Law of Falling Bodies
“With the publication of Uncontainable Noise, Steve Davenport marked himself as one of America’s finest poets. Now he knocks out a major essay, Murder on Gasoline Lake, and he bests America’s personal essayists. Is there anything this guy can’t write better than the rest of us? I doubt it.”
— ERIC MILES WILLIAMSON
author of Oakland, Jack London, and Me
“So much writing on American place is sloppy, nostalgic remembrance of places that never really existed. But here, Davenport brings the soil, the petroleum stink in ballcaps, memory, and Illinois floodplain. Here, place is an onslaught of occasion, a town called maybe.”
— GARIN CYCHOLL
author of Rafetown Georgics
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Steve Davenport is the author of Uncontainable Noise (2006), which won Pavement Saw Press s Transcontinental Poetry Prize. He is the Associate Director of Creative Writing at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the Creative Nonfiction Editor of Ninth Letter, and the father of many daughters, most of whom live with him and his wife, Lynn.
