About this item
Fans of Truman Capotes In Cold Blood and John Berendts Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil will embrace Poe Ballantines Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere. Poe Ballantines Free Rent at the Totalitarian Hotel included in Best American Essays 2013, and for well over twenty years, Poe Ballantine traveled America, taking odd jobs, living in small rooms, trying to make a living as a writer. At age 46, he finally settled with his Mexican immigrant wife in Chadron, Nebraska, where they had a son who was red-flagged as autistic. Poe published four books about his experiences as a wanderer and his observations of America. But one day in 2006, his neighbor, Steven Haataja, a math professor from the local state college disappeared. Ninety five days later, the professor was found bound to a tree, burned to death in the hills behind the campus where he had taught.
About the Author
Born in the same year that Disneyland opened, Poe Ballantine spent the majority of his adult life wandering North America. His reports from the trenches, the bottom-rung jobs, desperate characters, seedy rooms, loneliness, and rejection slips, have recently been classified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as mood elevators. For nearly thirty years he lived on an average of four hundred a month, often unable to buy coffee or cheese or to see a movie or have his hair cut professionally. He lived largely alone, learned to read the curvature of night, the worn-out dials on laundromat dryers, and the cruelty of men. He read a few thousand books and dozed through a few thousand wayward days on a Greyhound or a Trailways bus. For sixteen years he did not see a dentist, until one day at the age of forty-six he married one. Like a desert in bloom, a beautiful son and several books followed. Having worked in eighteen restaurants, Poe enjoys cooking for friends and family. His specialties all come from peasant traditions: soups, stews, sauces, breads, garden brines, cheladas, bean dishes, and chiles roasted black until they crack. He is the author of eight books, his most popular title Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere (Hawthorne Books) , though he thinks that Things I Like About America (also Hawthorne) is better. His fourth novel, Torpedoes d'Amour, was issued by Bourbon Flashback Press in March of 2019. He lives across the street from the railroad tracks in a slump-roofed house with his gorgeous Mexican wife and son in a small town in the northwest corner of Nebraska, not far from the famous Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. He says howdy to you and would like to drink all of your beer.
