Description
- Kind: Perfectbound
- Pages: 116
- Language: English
- Date Published: August 2025
- ISBN 978-1-962847-30-8
Praise
Ken Autrey, author of Vocation, works his craft of verbal artistry through four thematic parts and summons memories that have remained relevant. Of his father, he writes about sorting through “shards and remnants he left behind.” From paintings, photographs, and travel memories Autrey shares his world with keen observations of his past that mirror many of our own memories: the barber’s “snip and shear,” and “the sound of fading train whistles.” A world traveler, he illuminates the allure of exotic places: “Night descends like a mellow curtain.” Throughout Vocation, Autrey’s poems, with their striking details, echo connections to familiar insights that will linger and satisfy beyond the first reading. —Wendy Cleveland, author of Blue Ford
Robert Frost wrote “The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.” Ken Autrey’s Vocation is a book deeply invested in fact, memory, voices, and labor. These poems are made with the tenacity of labor and an observant eye turned to the work of the hands – his, and his ancestors. It is a redemptive and redeeming labor; dare I say a salvific and transcendent (secular) labor yielding to joy? —Hank Lazer, author of Abundant Life: New & Selected Poems
These poems claim poignant ground, with some especially moving in their reverie. The memories and the wisdom that grows from simple things mark these poems with comfort. They take their firm anchoring in truth, distinguishing this collection. —Robert Parham, author of The Relentlessness of Salvation
Excerpt
The Workshop
I’ve spent the afternoon in the workshop
my father built a good fifty years back
on a hill outside of town. Today I’ve
driven here in my pickup not to build
a set of shelves, plane a new leaf
for the dining room table, or refinish
a ladderback chair. This time I give
myself over to sorting the jumble
of nails, bolts, washers, fasteners,
hinges, and screws he left behind.
In the end the care that once led him
to hang every wrench in its place
and drop every unused nut
in the assigned plastic drawer,
gave way to the entropy of dementia,
the chaos inside him spilling over
into the dust and gloom of this home
away from home that even sunlight
through the huge plate glass windows
could not dispel.
I am following his footsteps
back and forth across the plank floor
as I breathe in the fumes of oil and oak
that sustained him even after he lost
the craftsman’s know-how that came
from a depression- plagued farm
in Louisiana. Sifting through shards
and remnants he left behind,
much of it rusted and useless,
I’m after something more than order.
I’m finally old enough, just
a few years short of the age he died,
to know that setting things right is more
than getting all the 10-penny nails
in one Maxwell House coffee can, more
than sequencing all the drill bits by size.
Maybe one day I too will lose my bearings,
haunt the places I love without recalling
what first drew me to them. Others,
perhaps my daughters, may one day
make sense of my late wandering
in some cluttered room or patch of woods
and somehow rediscover my voice, my touch.
Author
Ken Autrey lives in Auburn, Alabama, where he helps coordinate the Third Thursday Poetry Series. He earned degrees from Davidson College, Auburn University, and the University of South Carolina. He is an Emeritus Professor of English at Francis Marion University in South Carolina, where he taught poetry, creative nonfiction, and advanced composition. Previously, he served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ghana and taught at Tougaloo College in Mississippi. He spent one year as a visiting professor at Hiroshima University in Japan. Autrey’s work has appeared in Chattahoochee Review, Cimarron Review, Poetry Northwest, Southern Poetry Review, Texas Review and many other journals. He has published four chapbooks: Pilgrims (Main Street Rag), Rope Lesson (Longleaf Press), The Wake of the Year (Solomon and George Press), and Penelope in Repose (Evening Street Press). A full-length collection, Circulation, was published by Dos Madres Press. He is married to Janne Debes. They have two daughters and six grandchildren.
