The Bus Driver's Threnody

Michael Spence

Jul 2014 · Truman State University Press

About this ebook

 The Bus Driver's Threnody brings to poetic life a world literally in transit: the movement of people along its roads and highways facilitated by public transit and the drivers who steer their buses. Focusing on the separate world-within-a-world of the bus—with relationships among riders, between drivers and riders, and between the bus and other vehicles that share the road—these poems give weight and substance to a segment of the everyday that is largely ignored. Within that separate world, this book brings to light (and dark) the depths and complexities of metropolitan living through this seemingly prosaic facet of modern American life.

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The bus drivers threnody

About the author

 Michael Spence spent a hitch as a junior naval officer aboard the aircraft carrier USS John F. Kennedy (CV-67), then returned to Seattle, where he spent thirty years driving public-transit buses in the Seattle area. He has three poetry collections: The Spine (Purdue University Press, 1087), Adam Chooses (Rose Alley Press, 1998), and Crush Depth (Truman State University Press, 2009). The Bus Driver’s Threnody was a finalist for The New Criterion Poetry Prize. In 1990, Spence was awarded a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and he has received half a dozen nominations for a Pushcart Prize. His work has appeared in many magazines, including The American Scholar, The Chariton Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Hopkins Review, The Hudson Review, Literary Imagination, Measure, The New Criterion, The New Republic, The North American Review, Poetry, Poetry Northeast, The Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, Tampa Review, Tar River Poetry, and The Yale Review.