Topic: Lori Garrison

“You make love / like a horse on the Parthenon. / Fuck you / And the you you rode in on.”

Mountains and museums. Rivers and suburban roadways. Water bottles, wheelbarrows, sunflowers and salmon. In Jeff Steudel’s Foreign Park, cityscapes become landscapes become environmental wastelands become personal metaphors, leaping from page to page and moment to moment with a calm, intense thoughtfulness like the morning after a hard night’s drunk. Careful and poised, yet possessed of a certain self-effacing charm and a genuine warmth, Foreign Park is surprisingly complete and mature for a first book.