The Sky Over Walgreens

Mayapple Press, 2007

The Sky Over Walgreens is a terrific book that explores being a human animal with just the right admixture of compassion, candor and wonder. Green is a super lucid poet: comic, clear eyed, and smart. He’s not afraid, in these poems, to be seen in the company of every kind of love, and to acknowledge love’s shadows. His poems make me laugh and cry (sorry about the cliché but it’s true!) but never in that manipulative way where one feels ashamed of one’s tears. Green is equally adept at dealing with humor and suffering. His spot on homages to other poets are some of the best I have read. There is nothing predetermined about these poems. They are excellent examples, rather, of “the art where each stroke is a sailor/arriving at port.” Whether he’s writing from the point of view of a dog (“If there is anger in me, it is squirrels. I’d like to take their trees and small funds of nuts and leave them with nothing but their precious acrobatics”) or revealing what Captain Ahab orders at Starbucks (“one last grande white chocolate mocha caffe Americano no foam latte”) or writing about “Fertility Woes” or juxtaposing his grandmother’s death with a shark documentary, Green has given us a fascinating variety of truly affecting, limber poems, all of them inventive and a joy to read.

—Amy Gerstler