Content warning: strong language.
Reading Benjamin Drevlow‘s new collection of poems/pomes, Trash Poems for Trash People, put me in remembrance of my grandfather who, on walks home from his job at the shoe factory, had a habit of picking up items others left on the curb and bringing them home, thinking he might somehow find a use for them. The idiom “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure” also sprang to mind as I read through this collection. That phrase aligns with the opening words of this volume’s epitaph:
Trash only becomes trash if you throw it away
Let it grow and clutter and climb and spread wings and fly.
Suddenly it becomes the hot new home decor.
Like some weird sort of alchemist, Drevlow, who is also the editor-in-chief of a great literary magazine called BULL and the author of several other books, turns trash into treasure with the poems in this collection. At least I think it’s treasure. Does that make me one of the trash people? If the old, discarded boot someone tossed at a dumpster and missed fits this misfit…
Read on to learn more about his reasons for writing this book, his work at BULL, his influences, his teaching gig at Georgia Southern University, and more.
Continue reading “Friday Five: talking trash with Benjamin Drevlow”
Andrew Careaga 