Tag Archives: The Salt Ecstasies

It was with a dour scour that I first eyed a slim, musty, and altogether grim copy of James L. White’s The Salt Ecstasies.  I was juggling the rigors of professorship while completing my MFA, and White’s was one of a dozen inter-library loans (most of which were rare and/or out of print) I needed to inhale upon arrival as part of my required coursework.  According to the card sleeved in its back cover, the book hadn’t felt a reader’s hands in years, and I bristled at being assigned a collection of poems seemingly forgotten by the universe.  What I quickly found within those yellowed pages, however, were the most candid, authentic, and compelling poems about American eros that I had ever read.

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