Bluff City

by David Lohrey, Dennis Mahagin (Foreword by)

Overview

"That was my first lesson as a male prostitute. Prostitutes don't own things. There's only a rental agreement, no contract. One needs to get serious."

America is a nation in decline; that much is obvious. At what point did America go from splitting the atom to smashing statues, from Southern hospitality to apathetic vulgarity, from conquest and victory to dysfunction and defeat? There's a lot of ruin in a nation, and the best observer of that ruin is a man who's spent his life watching the buildings fall down.

Bluff City is a collection of over 40 of David Lohrey's best short stories, poems, and more. Drawing on his Southern upbringing, background as a teacher, and life as an expat, Lohrey cuts through the white noise of American culture with trenchant observations and dark wit on everything from Elvis groupies to inner-city schools to Japanese porn theaters and more.

This collection includes several stories and poems published by Terror House Magazine from 2018 to 2020.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781951897192
Publisher:	Terror House Press, LLC
Publication date:	08/21/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	182
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

David Lohrey is from Memphis, Tennessee, a graduate of U.C. Berkeley. His plays have been produced in Switzerland, Canada, and Lithuania. His poems can be found at Expat Press, Cardiff Review, The Drunken Llama, and Trouvaille Review. His fiction can be seen at Dodging the Rain, Storgy Magazine, Terror House Magazine, and Literally Stories. David's first collection of poetry, Machiavelli's Backyard, was published in 2017 by Sudden Denouement Publishing (Houston). He lives in Tokyo.

Table of Contents

Foreword by Dennis Mahagin

Bluff City

Poetry

Daylight Savings Time

Authentic

Camel Milk and Bedlam

Inappropriate

Spam in a Can

Thrown Together: A Memoir

Bronze Shoes on Horseback

Why We Can't Have Nice Things

Imperialism

Worse for Wear

Southern Comfort

Sayonara

One, Two, Three: A Play in One Act

An Act of Exploration: An Interview with David Lohrey

Editorial Reviews

"Lohrey's work stands singularly peer-to-peer alongside that of the great Juvenal, imperial Rome's trenchant satirist of that louche society's delirium of privilege, which so resembles our own contemporary 'woke' American moment. Wading through the fetishistic wreckage of our disordered gender norms, the cant and viciousness of our deranged political discourse, the emaciation of our family dynamics, and just about every other depredation of our present culture wars, Lohrey's poems and stories take surgical synecdoches and mentonymies to the weird cosmetic body of America, apply jolting electroshock-like litotes to its degenerating mindset, and administer a Huck Finn-like purgative of sane bewilderment to the constipation of its fatuous utopian innards, all in a great lament...and a great head-shaking laughter... at our slipping national greatness. Lohrey's voice is a commanding one for our time." - Professor Robert Cirasa, English Department Chair, Emeritus, Kean University, New Jersey

"I've only come across a few poets in my lifetime that are so original that their verse is both instantly recognizable and hard to forget. Charles Bukowski was one. Douglas Goodwin was another. David Lohrey joins that club, in my mind. Like Bukowski and Goodwin, Lohrey's narrative verse projects a stolid exterior as it contextualizes current events to expose the hypocrisy and contradictions inherent in human behavior. Beneath the exterior, though, peeking out from time to time, is a heart that would prefer not to be hardened by what it has endured. That's ultimately what makes poets like Bukowski, Goodwin, and Lohrey worth reading-and hard to forget. Lohrey's 'Solitary Confinement' in this book says it best: 'We only get one heart / it'd be foolish to break it.'" - Jay Dougherty, Open Arts Forum

"I grew up reading E.E. Cummings, T.S. Eliot, and poetic gods of old. Today, I am bombarded by poetry that is something completely different. David's poetry is unconventional; it defines what I call divergent literature. I crafted the slogan for Sudden Denouement, 'A Divergent Literary Collective,' never knowing that someone like David would stumble into my life. His poetry should be discussed in the same vein as the poetic heroes of my youth. Discovering the poetry of David Lohrey was an event in my life. There are a million poets in a world of social media, but there are few who possess the poetic sensibilities of Lohrey. Publishing his book will be one of my greatest accomplishments. Machiavelli's Backyard is an inspired work, a vision that I am proud to have had the honor of putting the SD name on." - Jasper Kerkau, Sudden Denouement Publishing

"To say David Lohrey is irreverent and provocative is to criminally understate how gleefully he tosses tropes in the tumbler of his inverted absurdist Rockwell diorama, to miss the sobering melancholic notes of world-weary skepticism, the delectably weird two-tone storytelling, the madcap humor and antisocial relishing that characterizes this incomparably human poet. Bluff City is anti-twee, it is pure edge without lifting a finger to strain obscenity. David Lohrey is a lifer who has earned his spurs with no lies left to tell, telling you the bald truth, sui generis. His poetry will endure as long as there are readers hungry for something quite unlike anything they've never read, eager to bear witness to words doing what they're made to do; shock, profane the sacred, induce fits of gallows laughter, and detonate the zeitgeist. It is a vital dose of wild fun through a kaleidoscopic historical lens. David Lohrey is dangerously addictive and infectious." - Manuel Marrero, author of Thousands of Lies and Not Yet

From the Publisher