Description
Before Traveling to Alabama is the final collection of poems by David Allen Case, featuring a forward by Gunpowder Press publisher David Starkey.
David Allen Case was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on July 15, 1961. He earned a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Alabama and a Ph.D. in English from UCLA. From the mid-80’s through 2011, he taught at several institutions of higher learning, including UCLA, Los Angeles City College, Pasadena City College, Glendale Community College, and Santa Fe College in Gainesville, Florida. He died unexpectedly at age 49 in Gainesville. Case’s first book, The Tarnation of Faust, was published posthumously by Gunpowder Press in 2014. The publication of Before Traveling to Alabama further highlights Case’s remarkable talent and marks the tenth anniversary of the Press, which, but for his poetry, would not exist.
I remember best, and most achingly, David Case’s ironic earnestness; even in casual conversation he was always mixing another moving mashup.I’m particularly struck now, reading these poems, by the timeliness of this, how they reveal the ways the complications of kitsch and the undertow of wonder in American culture might either doom or redeem us. “Who’s ever seen a happy // piano player in a movie?” the man at the keyboard asks. Look here, and you’ll find him, as I did once again, reveling in his trenchant wit, remembering his devilish hesitant grin.
—Reed Wilson, Creative Writing Coordinator, UCLA
David Case is a master of the seemingly effortless one-off, but the strength of his poetry is its dazzling complexity. What I most admire about his work is the high wire act in which he vaults from his formidable command of literary and cultural history to wry observations on whatever bits of trash are at hand.
—Carolie Parker, author of Mirage Industry
