A Dog’s Job of Work
POEMS BY SAMUEL PRESTRIDGE
Sam Prestridge is a poet’s poet. His everyday stories about everyday people and their everyday struggles are told in a simple and direct language that belies the surgical skill used in composing them.
The poems of his collection A Dog’s Job of Work are equal parts of wit, pithiness, and poignancy. Perhaps what’s best about them is that they are meant to be read aloud. Which maybe is what truly makes them poetry.
“I’m grateful for Samuel Prestridge.” ~Roy Bentley
“…man, nobody can poem the blooze like Samuel Prestridge.” ~Bill Nevins
About the Author
Samuel Prestridge
“Samuel Prestridge’s poem ‘Loose Gravel’ is a gorgeous 7-part piece of work that ends with this: ‘“I caught the jonquils wagging / their temporal sass while lifting, / lifting themselves from the blank, ruined mix. / Out of the rusty darkness, such yellow.”’ Having read that, and considered it, I begin with a big Wow. The poems in this book unfold, many from a long-title premise or factual assertion, given the way titles occasionally function as a trumpet-fl ourish of sorts. The poem that called me back most often was (and is) ‘“Seven guys all wearing refl ective ge ar and hard hats have taken a break from trenching a sewer line, and they’re standing in a row and looking straight up into the trees, maybe at the cross arm of an old wooden power pole”’—I am struck by: It’s not my job. It’s not my line / of sight, so I can’t say. Which, for this writer, serves to anchor this book in a well of hard-won Truth we yet trust. I’m grateful for Samuel Prestridge.” ~ROY BENTLEY, finalist for the Miller Williams Prize for Walking with Eve in the Loved City.
“From Yazoo City to Robert Johnson’s crossroad and on to our bloody ragged Afghanistan retreat via the Fredericksburg battlefi eld, this poet brings the mad blues razor edge of surreal musicality along Highway 61 Redux, and man, nobody can poem the blooze like Samuel Prestridge.” ~BILL NEVINS, journalist, songwriter, educator, poet, and author of Light Bending
SAMUEL PRESTRIDGE lives and works in Athens, Georgia. His work has been nominated for Best of the Net, and he has published work in numerous publications, including Literary Imagination, Style, The Arkansas Review, As It Ought To Be, Poetry Quarterly, Appalachian Quarterly, Paideuma, The Lullwater Review, Poem, Juke Joint, and The Southern Humanities Review, Delta, Better than Starbucks, Untelling, Hog River Press, and Synkroniciti, where he was a featured poet.
He is a post-aspirational man and is currently an Associate Professor of English at the University of North Georgia. His children concede that he is, generally speaking, an adequate father.