ROADSIDE ASSISTANCE
Charles Rammelkamp reviews a prose and poetry anthology edited by Dan Denton & Michele McDannold
Roadside Assistance: A Roadside Press Reader
Dan Denton & Michele McDannold (eds)
Roadside Press, 2026
$18.00, 206 pages
ISBN: 979-8-9946833-2-3
One of the bright spots of small press publishing during the decade of the 2020s has been Roadside Press and its consistently impressive offerings. While in the Introduction to Roadside Assistance the editors insist that the anthology is not meant as a “best of” or “greatest hits” collection, the prose and poetry pieces included in the volume are all gems, fifteen of them prose, alongside thirty-three poets. From Francine Witte’s flash fiction tour de force, Radio Water to Jennifer Juneau’s amazing Maze, a collection of twelve intriguingly linked and enigmatic short stories; from Catfish McDaris’ story “If This Is Love, I’m Not Happy” (featured in the book Prying and written in collaboration with Charles Bukowski and Jack Micheline) to poetry excerpts from Alan Catlin’s Another Saturday Night in Jukebox Hell, Richard Vargas’ Screw City Poems and George Wallace’s Resurrection Song: these pieces are all hits as far as I’m concerned.
It’s tough to single out one writer from the field of forty-eight as somehow representative of the collection as a whole since each has a unique voice and perspective, a personal style, but one of my favorites is Dave Newman’s poem, “The Economy” from his Roadside collection, Better Than the Best American Poetry. Newman’s work is familiar to many who read small press literary magazines. The poem features two brothers sitting in a bar. It’s not totally clear what is going on between them, but the speaker assures us, ‘Drugs were not the issue. / It was employment and opportunity.’ Getting down to business, the brother of the speaker takes a card from his wallet. Fade to black. The cozy mystery is like something from an Edward Hopper painting. Susan Ward Mickelberry begins her poem, “I Loved You” with a likewise enthralling image: ‘At first I loved you / for being an asshole.’ Notice the past tense!
It’s tempting to describe Roadside Press’s authors as “outlaws,” but that would be misleading. Still, as Bob Dylan sang in “Absolutely Sweet Marie”: ‘To live outside the law you must be honest.’ Each of the writers in Roadside Assistance has a vision of a unique moral code, a personal integrity in face of the chaos around us.
The tone ranges throughout, from grim to jubilant, resigned to hopeful. There’s the tender, sad innocence of “Men Hit Women, even in 1972,” a poem from Dan Provost’s Wolf Whistles Behind the Dumpster, in which a group of ten-year-old boys playing baseball notice the wobbly woman who staggers past them – ‘Battered, bruised, dirty / red hair, torn blouse / down the back… // Bra strap fluttering like / a white surrender flag.’ – but haven’t yet the experience to put two and two together (too timid to break that ‘world of naivety’). There’s also Danny Shot’s memory of Allen Ginsberg from his collection of fiction and nonfiction pieces, Night Bird Flying. Like Provost’s poem, Shot’s writings are similarly “coming of age” narratives. The memory of meeting Ginsberg and attending his funeral is joyous and triumphant, truly elegiac.
Belinda Subraman’s poems about politics and insomnia from Full Moon Midnight are profound and frustrating, to which we can all relate in the current political atmosphere. “Anyone Else Awake? 2:00 a.m.” starts out:
In every war women and children are killed.
Hospitals and schools are bombed.
Wlliam Taylor Jr. echoes this in “Why We Sing,” a poem from his collection, The People Are Like Wolves to Me:
The universe is forever
indifferent to our sorrow
and this is why we
make a music of it.
Scot Young’s “as Dillinger waits,” which anchors the collection, reads:
an outlaw
shot the last
colt forty
five
ricocheting
through the
universe
like tequila
shot glasses
slammed on a
sawdust floor
and tonight
lola
will dance
for no one
Editors Dan Denton and Michele McDannold (who is also the Roadside Press publisher) likewise have pieces excerpted from their books. Denton’s is a chapter from his novel, The Dead and the Desperate (‘One of the few saving graces I’ve had the dumb luck of having, is sometimes, when my back is really against a desperate wall, I can lace up the work boots, put my head down, and grind the motherfucking machines.’). McDannold has three poems from her Collected Poems, 2005-2025, including the defiant “doorbells, mornings and death or (if you are cunt),” in which, again, with an almost outlaw-like vibe, she spells out her own style, inspiration:
Listen
when you start writing from the brain
chuck it out the door
feed the cats with it
call it meow meow chow
Hers is poetry that comes from pain and passion – which ‘doesn’t need to be developed.’
Roadside Assistance is definitely worth checking out, a sort of Readers Digest sampling of what the press offers. You just might want to try some of their titles after reading these pieces.
Mar 24 2026
Roadside Assistance
ROADSIDE ASSISTANCE
Charles Rammelkamp reviews a prose and poetry anthology edited by Dan Denton & Michele McDannold
Roadside Assistance: A Roadside Press Reader
Dan Denton & Michele McDannold (eds)
Roadside Press, 2026
$18.00, 206 pages
ISBN: 979-8-9946833-2-3
One of the bright spots of small press publishing during the decade of the 2020s has been Roadside Press and its consistently impressive offerings. While in the Introduction to Roadside Assistance the editors insist that the anthology is not meant as a “best of” or “greatest hits” collection, the prose and poetry pieces included in the volume are all gems, fifteen of them prose, alongside thirty-three poets. From Francine Witte’s flash fiction tour de force, Radio Water to Jennifer Juneau’s amazing Maze, a collection of twelve intriguingly linked and enigmatic short stories; from Catfish McDaris’ story “If This Is Love, I’m Not Happy” (featured in the book Prying and written in collaboration with Charles Bukowski and Jack Micheline) to poetry excerpts from Alan Catlin’s Another Saturday Night in Jukebox Hell, Richard Vargas’ Screw City Poems and George Wallace’s Resurrection Song: these pieces are all hits as far as I’m concerned.
It’s tough to single out one writer from the field of forty-eight as somehow representative of the collection as a whole since each has a unique voice and perspective, a personal style, but one of my favorites is Dave Newman’s poem, “The Economy” from his Roadside collection, Better Than the Best American Poetry. Newman’s work is familiar to many who read small press literary magazines. The poem features two brothers sitting in a bar. It’s not totally clear what is going on between them, but the speaker assures us, ‘Drugs were not the issue. / It was employment and opportunity.’ Getting down to business, the brother of the speaker takes a card from his wallet. Fade to black. The cozy mystery is like something from an Edward Hopper painting. Susan Ward Mickelberry begins her poem, “I Loved You” with a likewise enthralling image: ‘At first I loved you / for being an asshole.’ Notice the past tense!
It’s tempting to describe Roadside Press’s authors as “outlaws,” but that would be misleading. Still, as Bob Dylan sang in “Absolutely Sweet Marie”: ‘To live outside the law you must be honest.’ Each of the writers in Roadside Assistance has a vision of a unique moral code, a personal integrity in face of the chaos around us.
The tone ranges throughout, from grim to jubilant, resigned to hopeful. There’s the tender, sad innocence of “Men Hit Women, even in 1972,” a poem from Dan Provost’s Wolf Whistles Behind the Dumpster, in which a group of ten-year-old boys playing baseball notice the wobbly woman who staggers past them – ‘Battered, bruised, dirty / red hair, torn blouse / down the back… // Bra strap fluttering like / a white surrender flag.’ – but haven’t yet the experience to put two and two together (too timid to break that ‘world of naivety’). There’s also Danny Shot’s memory of Allen Ginsberg from his collection of fiction and nonfiction pieces, Night Bird Flying. Like Provost’s poem, Shot’s writings are similarly “coming of age” narratives. The memory of meeting Ginsberg and attending his funeral is joyous and triumphant, truly elegiac.
Belinda Subraman’s poems about politics and insomnia from Full Moon Midnight are profound and frustrating, to which we can all relate in the current political atmosphere. “Anyone Else Awake? 2:00 a.m.” starts out:
In every war women and children are killed.
Hospitals and schools are bombed.
Wlliam Taylor Jr. echoes this in “Why We Sing,” a poem from his collection, The People Are Like Wolves to Me:
The universe is forever
indifferent to our sorrow
and this is why we
make a music of it.
Scot Young’s “as Dillinger waits,” which anchors the collection, reads:
an outlaw
shot the last
colt forty
five
ricocheting
through the
universe
like tequila
shot glasses
slammed on a
sawdust floor
and tonight
lola
will dance
for no one
Editors Dan Denton and Michele McDannold (who is also the Roadside Press publisher) likewise have pieces excerpted from their books. Denton’s is a chapter from his novel, The Dead and the Desperate (‘One of the few saving graces I’ve had the dumb luck of having, is sometimes, when my back is really against a desperate wall, I can lace up the work boots, put my head down, and grind the motherfucking machines.’). McDannold has three poems from her Collected Poems, 2005-2025, including the defiant “doorbells, mornings and death or (if you are cunt),” in which, again, with an almost outlaw-like vibe, she spells out her own style, inspiration:
Listen
when you start writing from the brain
chuck it out the door
feed the cats with it
call it meow meow chow
Hers is poetry that comes from pain and passion – which ‘doesn’t need to be developed.’
Roadside Assistance is definitely worth checking out, a sort of Readers Digest sampling of what the press offers. You just might want to try some of their titles after reading these pieces.