ADAM’S RIBS
By Terry McAdams
The freshness of these poems flows from a passionate edginess, combined with a rich lyric range. Adams is afraid of nothing. In the opening poem a father, whose dying mother didn’t kiss him because she thought she was contagious, can’t kiss his fourteen year old daughter because she is “too beautiful and vulnerable”:
The one not kissed thinks she is bad
or he is angry, feels for no reason
she is dying or he is dying
and won’t say.
It is like that with these poems: they visit great pain in its myriad forms, yet do so with redeeming compassion.
Adams’ long poems, like “Cincinnati River Aubade,” are ambitious, even epical, and open the kind of space with which the poet can
...become one of the dreams risen in the a black mist
on the flowing stealth of waking water,
ebbing outward from the reeds
hair-washing in the backwaters...
In these poems Adams stakes his claim to be the new American Adam, and his bona fides is an eye and ear that perceive and shape with the double perception of innocence and experience. Reading Adams’ poems is like riding with him on his Harley, “footpeg scraping sparks from the concrete. . . .”
Praise for Adam's Ribs
"In Adam’s Ribs, Terry Adams makes a not-so-subtle claim to be the new American Adam. I’d say wholeheartedly that he succeeds. His voice is both gritty and dreamy, and it gets in your ear surreptitiously like the jazz he writes about so eloquently."
–Ann Neelon, author of Easter Vigil
"Terry Adams’s poems dazzle with their keen expressiveness and perfect lines. They do more than dazzle: they get inside you and stir the emotions by rendering his personal encounters with the living and the dying precisely, unsparingly, plainly, unmanipulatively."
–Phyllis Koestenbaum, author of Doris Day and Kitschy Melodies
"Poems that etch themselves into our minds by virtue of their powerful and sometimes astonishing images, their often-risky subject matter, their angled approach, their tone of contemplation and yearning."
–Chitra Divakaruni, author of Mistress of Spices
"Terry Adams’s long-awaited debut book is a treasure trove of poems about family, motorcycles, Vietnam, the scrotum, Flash Gordon, jazz, the pink and yellow gills of a dead catfish—and just about everything under the Buckeye-and-Golden-State sun. His characters bump into one another or, more often, take leave of one another, and his narratives and incantations are charged with a wistfulness quite unique, given the current literary scene. If Adams risks sentiment, he is part of a long tradition of poets who have eschewed what could be called 'university wit.' . . . Adam’s Ribs resonates with free verse by Whitman, Bly, Dickey, James Wright—and a host of bards going back to the Old Testament patriarchs. This is one smackeroo of a book. For God’s sake, beg, borrow, or Steal it! Read it!"
—James Reiss, author of Riff on Six: New and Selected Poems