In the Time of Sonic Booms - by B Fulton Jennes (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Readers can travel back to small-town America in the 1960's via the poems in this vivid collection. Many of the poems capture details about the people who inhabit one such community. These include, among others, the doctor's daughter, who people assumed "had it good;" the military kid who waited at the end of the driveway for his van to the Christian Boys Academy, and who had no friends; crazy Old Man Morner who lived in a shack at the edge of the creek; the narrator's father with his guns and his "disappointment of daughters;" and Uncle Fred, who lived years with only one lung. Her poems capture both the common violence and the unexpected tenderness of that time and place.

Review Quotes

B. Fulton Jennes' In the Time of Sonic Booms is a passionate evocation of a small-town, mid-century American childhood made dangerous by hapless parents, ignorant neighbors, cruel children, canting churches, and the occasional escaped criminal. Jennes is part of this time and place, and she describes it with such precision and sensuality that readers of a certain age will shake their heads with recognition, wondering how we survived (though some people didn't). But most thrilling in these poems are the stories in which these folks, harried by life and bad luck, carve out small moments of hand-me-down, unkempt tenderness. I come away from this book loving these insufferable people, doing for one another the best they could, though it was far from enough.

-Patrick Donnelly, author of Willow Hammer

Jennes has a careful eye that makes you want to believe everything. Here we find the casual cruelty of children mixed in with creepy neighbors, accidental murderers, and the fantasies of bomb shelters. Every house we encounter is hiding something both dark and commonplace. By the time we're done reading, we can understand this town is just "a cemetery full of people you never liked anyway."

- Charles Rafferty, author of The Appendectomy Grin

How could one not be enthralled by B. Fulton Jennes' martyrology of characters from her upstate New York town, her childhood in the early Sixties? Don't be fooled. There is no nostalgia here. These are brutal narratives. A boy who shot his brother. A father who "thought of guns and knives as children's gifts." A violence so common it is almost matter of fact. This is a landscape of work and getting by. But despite the darkness, there is hard-earned joy here too and solidarity among mothers and daughters as Jennes gives us language that confronts, holds, and heals us on every page.

-Sean Thomas Dougherty, author of Death Prefers the Minor Keys and The Second O of Sorrow.