Praise for Local Heroes

David Tucker celebrates the incandescence of the every day, and raises the ordinary to art—a telephone as quiet as an heirloom, the stillness tended like wheat—even as he mourns the quickness of time passing. There are gems on every page, in every line, in poems full of pathos and humor and longing. And always, the last words linger, still shimmering with a reverence for life amidst all the losses.

—Amy Nutt, Pulitzer Prize winning author

In Local Heroes David Tucker, a life-long and award-winning newspaper reporter, delivers hard news while also turning his lyric eye to the hard truth closest at hand: time’s forward march. “Daylight Savings Time” opens There is a morning each November/when an hour is given back to us. Yes, we lose it/again in March but for now who cares? Tucker’s central concern is that now, rich with mystery and disappointment and wonder. “Talking to the Cat at Four A.M.” ends Happiness, I never know/when you’re coming/or why. He writes, There will/be glories that never make the newspaper.” This wise and mature book is full of such glories.

—Suzanne Cleary, prize-winning poet and author of forthcoming collection, The Odds

David Tucker’s new book weaves life in the newsroom, life on the streets, and the failings and flickering joys of his own life in a tenderly honest way. It’s telling that the local heroes of his title are women, some of whom live the sorts of lives Thoreau described as quiet desperation, while others, like Aunt Rubena, a county clerk “re-elected fourteen times without opposition” spends her days under” a turret fan that spread a blessing of little breezes/ around the office.” To give you an idea of his fine ear, I offer one happiness and one sorrow “a daughter’s red sneaker/ sits all afternoon on the windowsill/trying to be quiet” and, of a woman waiting to be taken away, “The boy says why do they call it the crazy house?/ and she said cause they’s crazy people in it/I guess, but he doesn’t say what he sees now:/ a downpour of words, the rain dogs/running loose out there and life without her.”

—Lola Haskins, author of Homelight and thirteen other poetry collections