American Waste
by Everette Maddox
ISBN 0-916620-99-X
96 pages $20

This is a posthumous collection of poems by Maddox, who died in 1989. He graduated from the University of Alabama and taught at Xavier University and the University of New Orleans. During the last ten years of his life he ran the poetry reading series at the Maple Leaf Bar in New Orleans. His other collections are The Everette Maddox Songbook and Bar Scotch.

"Everette Maddox didn't shun the dangers of alcoholic sentimentality, but welcomed them, parodied them, turned them inside out, and made triumphantly from them these jauntily heartbroken poems. It took a canny, brave and desperate heart to make these poems, much less to make them well, and he did it. The poems themselves are the living proof - he was the dying proof - of how hugely our short lives matter." William Matthews, author of Blues If You Want.