“His stuff is pure Proustian existentialism. Midwestern mindtrips to the nth degree…”
— Bob Dylan on John Prine
The highway is a good place to take stock of things. Drive the open road on your own with no destination in mind and before too long you’ll find yourself drifting through your memory palace, cataloguing regrets, lost loves, departed friends, and missed opportunities. Most people, long-haul truckers and wandering troubadours aside, don’t get the chance to reflect like that too often, given the petty distractions and responsibilities that fill up the working week. But writer Meaghan Garvey, poet laureate of this phenomenon, has distilled and bottled the experience for the rest of us in her looping, nonlinear, sort-of-travelogue sort-of-memoir debut, Midwestern Death Trip.
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