Alliance, Illinois

While no county named Sunflower exists in Illinois, Etter's poems are peppered with references to actual Illinois towns (Kankakee, Prairie du Rocher, Vincennes), accurately-described counties ("hokeypokey Calhoun County,/the county with no railroad tracks"), real-life state road numbers(164), authentic product trademarks (Cyclone chain-link fence, Funk's G-Hybrid, Pabst Blue Ribbon), local historical events ("Black Hawk got a bum deal," "the 2nd Iowa and the 52nd Illinois"), once-existing railroads and streamliners ("the Erie-Lackawanna," the "Corn Belt Limited"), plus other bonafide Midwestern references ("Jesus Saves /on Kentfield's/fine red barn," "high on dandelion wine") all of which produce the stamp of everyday reality. In "Avery Lucas: Apples"(102) we hear Avery describe how he wanders through an autumn landscape of "a dozen boys playing/football on a muddy lawn," passing "front porch steps/orange with pumpkins" to arrive at "an abandoned orchard/of six scrawny trees" where he gathers the ugliest apples you've ever seen: puny, lop-sided, bird-pecked, yet possessing a special flavor all their own. [...]it is appropriate that he discourages us from considering the relationships that might exist from poem to poem or speaker to speaker. Recent publications in the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies and The International Journal of Comic Art focus on the cultural work of newspaper comic strips in the years leading up to and after World War II.