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The poems in Catch as Kitsch Can launch from the icons of our collective and personal pop cultures - celebrities, songs, poets, and pets. With the light, reckless abandon of a teenager, each plays its necessary, dangerous game of chicken - driving headlong towards the sentimental past in all of us.

Published 2018

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"In Catch as Kitsch Can the ordinary world of the actual and the inner world of wonder and memory waltz so deftly that we really are sitting in Mel's Diner even as we watch the show. In these poems the actual is the source of possibility, never its limitation, and of course an Iowa farm girl can pour Lake Erie in a teacup and be all the more real and present for doing so."

- Tim Hunt, author of Ticket Stubs and Liner Notes

winner of the 2018 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award

Police Captain Doug Ebersole knew the victim. Marni Lewis was an intern at the Secretary of State's office and the stepdaughter of former police chief and current state Senator, Tom Crosley.

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But to solve Marni's case, Ebersole will need to resolve the twenty-year-old mysteries surrounding the death of Crosley's other daughter, Jessica. The investigation will take him to a ramshackle boys club, to the Senate floor, to a convalescent home in Ohio, and to an after-hours Goth party at a skateboard center.

Along the way, he'll uncover a pattern of corruption that reaches to the highest levels of Illinois government. And why not?

In Springfield, Illinois, everything is political - even a dead body.

                                                                                                          Published 2002

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