Apocryphal Road Code

Description: Hobos, tramps and their codes of living—all figure prominently in this debut book of poetry by Jared Randall. Obsessed with the Depression-era stories told among his family, a wanderer traces the tumultuous roads of his own and society’s past, the troubled space between old memories and new recollections.

Buy it direct from the poet’s Alibris storefront, here (don’t forget to shoot me an email if you would like me to customize the signature), or at these fine bookstores in the Kalamazoo area: Michigan News Agency and Kazoo Books’ Parkview location. You can also find the Road Code at my publisher’s website, saltbooks.com.

Endorsements:

“‘Only a hobo but one more is gone, leavin’ nobody to sing his sad song.’ Those lines from an early Bob Dylan song came to mind as I read Apocryphal Road Code, Jared Randall’s ambitiously conceived and artfully realized sequence. Randall is there to sing the sad song and more.”

-Stuart Dybek

“A most desirable quality in lyric is that of strange familiarity. Jared Randall’s poems are wayfaring poems drawing on the hobo culture of the Great Depression, which means they bound to move on and bound to rest where they can. Without such bounds they find their various song. Formally the wayfaring rhythm shows in their alternation between pacy narrative and intricate traditional form. But throughout their demeanour is both curious and assured, so these are poems known to you before you know them. You are bound to read on and bound to stop here.”

-John Wilkinson

Reviews:

“Randall is a true ‘Hobo at Heart’ [...]. He not only captures the actual landscape of the American hobo’s existence with economic elegance but also translates it into an ‘everyman’s’ tale, showing how even our common experience keeping an old clunker on the road can symbolize the wayfarer’s frugal world [...].”

-Rick Dale, The Daily Beat (read full review)

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