Tornado Drill
ALDRICH PRESS – 2022
The polished poems in Dave Malone’s Tornado Drill spin readers from Kansas arroyos and Ozark lakes to sodden Paris side streets and back again. Along the way there are surprising glimpses through neighborhood windows and into manicured back yards, but no matter the setting, Malone’s true terrain is the human heart. Tornado Drill contains humor to balance grief, mystique to dress and attend memory, and spirit to animate craft. Without question, it is his finest book to date.
—C.D. Albin, author of Missouri Author Award’s Hard Toward Home
Don’t let the title fool you, this is no drill. There is real danger here—its undercurrent felt in every precise image, its power, palpable. Through tightly crafted, yet expansive portraits, glimpses, and moments, Dave Malone’s Tornado Drill invites us into a whole community of loss, desire, and want. You cannot help but be pulled into this vortex, astonished by the beauty and possibility you will discover here.
—Amy Ash, author of The Open Mouth of the Vase
Interviews / Reviews
Interview on KSMU Arts News
“Even if you swore off poetry after high school, it’s a strangely pleasing sensation to read about a region you have a deep connection with, represented with the care, precision, and creativity that Malone has brought to bear in his collection.”
—Evan Wood, Missouri Life (June issue).
“Dave Malone’s seventh poetry collection Tornado Drill offers a landscape of everyday people working and living, of sunrises and sunsets, of old lovers, of wrens who ‘drown the sky in flight.’ With grace, but without sentimentality, Malone’s poems follow these currents through the Midwest . . . . If in Tornado Drill there is destruction, it is counterbalanced with the lives people have built and rebuilt, and the resilience of moving forward.”
—Paulette Guerin, read full review at Elder Mountain.
“From my first read of the title poem, Dave Malone’s poetry reveals itself in its crafted word choice and artful metaphor . . . . A reader discovers in Malone’s poetry his ability to meld two stories into one, or perhaps reveal that they are both one.”
—Barry Harris, Tipton Poetry Journal, read full review here.
I think of the Missouri Ozarks as Dave Malone country. His poetry springs from the Ozark landscape, and it’s not all about hills. It also springs from the people of the Ozarks, his own family, the people he grew up with, and the people he knows. This is not the Winter’s Bone or Ozark of Hollywood’s imagination, but the real landscape of where one grows up, and where one’s family and friends still live . . . . Malone has an eye for nature; he also has an eye for human nature and human memory. Childhood returns with a rush in the poems, as does youth.
—Glynn Young, read full review at Tweetspeak Poetry.