Any Kind of Excuse

Nin Andrews

I have often, in this forum, sung the praises of the Wick Poetry Series chapbooks. Kent State has created a series of uniformly high quality. Some of the books are of higher quality than others-- they're going to have to look long and hard to find another book as good as Sarah Perrier's Just One of Those Things-- but if you pick up a Wick Series book, you're going to get a little dose of something worth reading, and you're probably going to end up wanting more of it.

Case in point: Nin Andrews. Any Kind of Excuse takes us back to Andrews', or her narrator's, southern childhood on the farm-- snakes, roosters, hired hands, half-crazy mystic grandmother, you know the drill. This is ground that has been well-trod in the world of the southern gothic, though I'm not sure it's ever been quite this pastoral.

Andrews' work is erotic without being overt, deft, subtle for the most part. There were a few times when it seemed the message was abrading through a thin place-- does every book about farms need fences that need mending in it?-- but they're mercifully few. From a technical standpoint, these are good, solid pieces, though nothing about their construction really stands out; you'll read them, and you'll enjoy them, and they'll probably get re-read. They're not going to throw you to the floor and have their way with you, but when, at the end of the night, you tell them "maybe we can be friends," you'll mean it.