Rodeo in Reverse

Picture reversing a rodeo: the rider flies back onto the horse, the horse bucks into stillness. A whirling cast of characters engage in self-interrogation and self-discovery and wrestle in similar fashion in the pages of Rodeo in Reverse, a debut collection from Lindsey Alexander, which Sean Hill calls “the genuine article.”Both time machine and microscope, Rodeo in Reverse is woven from bits of Americana: married life, art history, pioneers, and witches. These poems effortlessly traverse personal and historical pasts with tenderness and unrivaled humor. They offer a tour of American landscape—the trees with bitter crop of the South; the plains of the Midwest; the duels of a cartoonish Wild West. At once a wily romp and a lyric sweep, Rodeo in Reverse considers the possibilities and failures of domestic life on the never-ending quest of rounding up, and defining, the self. Rodeo in Reverse is the winner of the 2017 New Southern Voices Poetry Prize.

Lindsey D. Alexander is a Kentuckian who lives in East Tennessee with her dog and husband. She was named after a 1970s TV star and a broadcast journalist. She holds degrees from Indiana University and Purdue University. Her poems have appeared on Poets.org, and in Crazyhorse, Waxwing, The Southern Review, GRIST, and other publications. A poem she wrote won the 2015 Devil’s Lake Driftless Prize, and in 2014, she was a scholar at the month-long National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute “Reconsidering Flannery O’Connor.” For more, visit LDAlexander.com.