A Bag of Hands by Mather Schneider
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is a Runner-Up collection for the 2017 Rattle Chapbook Prize and so many must appreciated the “talky’ style of poetry contained herein:

It’s 5 a.m.
and I get the cab warmed up.
I drive to McDonald’s in the dark
where Josie is already working
the breakfast shift.
She gives me a coffee and a smile.
This is how we met
3 years ago.

Most of the poems go this way. The opening poem, “Hot Iron,” and the closing one, “Chasing the Green Card,” both work a little more for me. But I just cannot appreciate this sort of poetry. Billy Collins does it better. It must be me–so many editors do appreciate and publish poems of this sort. But this collection left me flat.

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