He Paves the Road with Iron Bars

By Caroline Knox
Publication Date: April 1, 2004

ISBN# 9780972348768 (5.5x8.5 60pp, paperback)

• Description
• Reviews
• Bio

• “Time doesn’t pass in New England, the library just gets bigger. Reading Caroline Knox one is grateful for her idiosyncratic guidance through the selva of text exfoliated (sometimes) and juxtaposed collagistically at other times. The desire that moves the concentrate sol of these word engines is one more powerful in our world now than it was when the world was smaller, namely ‘I have to have a book to really read.’ I really read this one, and felt time spinning, not passing.”—Andrei Codrescu
  
  Witty, compassionate, and restless, Knox fearlessly takes on NASCAR, numismatics, and canned Spam—and makes it all fascinating.
  
  Winner of the 2005 Maurice English Award

• This book is a collection of small explosions, startling lines nestled among the commons—not of machines, but of scholarship. The world of this book is a static of quotations and information, guided by whimsy and flavored with some wonderfully peculiar phrases.
  Malinda Markham, The Antioch Review
  
  Caroline Knox's fifth collection...reprises her use of quotes and utterances plucked from their contexts in poems that ultimately address their own creation. If this seems convoluted, it is, yet to sound effect. He Paves The Road With Iron Bars is a stimulating hybrid of theory and poetry...
  Penelope Cray, Pleiades

• Caroline Knox’s most recent publications are Hear Trains (Wave Books, 2019), To Drink Boiled Snow (Wave Books, 2015), Nine Worthies (Wave Books, 2010), and Flemish (Wave Books, 2013). Quaker Guns (Wave Books, 2008) received a Recommended Reading Award 2009 from the Massachusetts Center for the Book. He Paves the Road with Iron Bars, published by Verse Press in 2004, won the Maurice English Award 2005 for a book by a poet over 50. A Beaker: New and Selected Poems appeared from Verse Press in 2002. Her previous books are The House Party and To Newfoundland (Georgia 1984, 1989), and Sleepers Wake (Timken 1994).