# Reviews
##### Lottie Deno: A Novel of the Civil War & the American Southwest. By Frank Thurmond. (Marion, MI: Parkhurst Brothers Publishers, 2024. Pp. 240, $17.95, paperback)
“I was later accused of ‘running a disorderly
house,’ but that is of course nonsense, the kind
of thing men always want to say about a woman
who happens to be suc-
cessful in her own
right,” says Lottie Deno
about her thriving busi-
ness enterprise as she
reflects on her life in
Frank Thurmond’s
novel Lottie Deno. Now
in her 80s, as she re-
counts her story, Lottie
appears a remarkable
character, brilliantly de-
veloped from the historical figure who led an ad-
venturous life during the Civil War and the
turbulent decades that followed. The novel, sub-
titled A Novel of the Civil War and the American
Southwest, chronicles the Civil War’s impact on a
young girl’s growth and the life-altering choices
she makes in its aftermath. The novel vividly cap-
tures her evolution from an innocent girl in Ken-
tucky into a formidable and unconventional
woman, while also capturing socio-cultural up-
heavals of the post-Civil War South.
[](https://kb.astate.edu/uploads/images/gallery/2026-08/image-1786387089702.png)
Charlotte J. Tomkins, known as Carlotta and
later as Mysterious Maud and Lottie Deno, grew
up in Gallatin County, Kentucky, where her
family home became a Confederate recruitment
hub when the Civil War began. After her father’s
death in the war, she is sent to Detroit, partly to
separate her from Johnny, a Jewish boy she loves.
Despite their separation, Johnny manages to
meet her and they plan to move West. As things
don’t go as planned for Johnny, Carlotta falls for
Frank Thurmond, an outlaw who changes the
course of her life, again. Carlotta’s journey across
the chaotic post-war frontier is one of adventure
and resilience. She defies societal expectations,
survives kidnappings, befriends saloon owners,
and makes her own money and way in a lawless
world, finally settling in New Mexico.
Lottie speaks as a highly transformed and so-
cially aware woman, critical of slavery and unen-
thusiastic of the forces in play that fueled the
Civil War. Her inclination toward equality and
freedom for all is evident in her character from
an early age. As her story opens, she reflects on
her upbringing, recounting how her parents
owned “a large number of enslaved people,” and
here she adds in parenthesis “though I am now
terribly ashamed to admit it.” She calls the “talk
of the constitutional right to freedom” of the
Confederate sympathizers, like her father, “hyp-
ocritical,” as freedom “in their minds clearly ap-
plied only to wealthy, white (and male)
landowners like themselves. Despite being the
heiress of a slave-owning landowner from the
South, and taken by her father to many of his
business trips—from Detroit to European cities—
she develops a liberal worldview, and in fact,
learns to become someone the society would not
expect of a girl.
Her Nanny, a black woman, becomes her
confidant, and later she helps her secure free-
dom. Carlotta understands the price she may
have to pay for who she is becoming and what
she wants to do, but she learns to take risks at an
early age. Despite her family’s disapproval, she is
drawn to Johnny Golden from New York, a Jew-
ish boy. “I won’t have you cavorting with no Jew
boy!” said the father to her, and she recalls, “I did
not understand what I had done wrong.” She
was also strictly forbidden to socialize with
“darkies,” but she always rises above the social
norms of the time, and throughout her life she
affirms her humanity despite being a lady gam-
bler, often accused of cheating and manipula-
tion, through acts like buying freedom for Mary.
She even names her child “Mary” after her black
maid. The historical figure Charlotte Tomkins
Thurmond is known as a “notorious lady gam-
bler” and has become a subject of many other
books and articles like Edgar Rye’s historical fic-
tion The Quirt and the Spur: Vanishing Shadows of
the Texas Frontier. This novel by Thurmond does
a fabulous job highlighting her humane aspect
despite the kind of life she was forced—or chose—
to live. When we first meet her on the farm, she
is an innocent farm girl. But very quickly, when
her family loses it fortune to the new system, she
begins to gamble out of necessity. Quickly, she
grows into a “notorious” gambler, but readers
will easily forgive her, and they will continue to
sympathize with her, given the conditions within
which she functions.
The novel paints a vivid picture of the fron-
tiers in the aftermath of the Civil War. The un-
tamed frontiers are havens for outlawed rebels
and criminals and kidnappers seeking to make
fortunes by any means possible. Gambling and
saloon businesses thrive, and there’s a constant
talk of moving further west in pursuit of prosper-
ity, particularly the gold in California. As a West-
ern, the novel captures the spirit of suspense and
adventure, immersing readers in the turbulent,
unpredictable world of the era.
The expertly crafted first person narrative
makes it easy for the reader to immerse them-
selves in Lottie’s story. As the narrator of her own
tale, Lottie is reflective, considerate, and at times
humorous. We know all first person narrators are
unreliable, but that very fact, that Dottie is an
unreliable narrator, allows the story to rise above
mere historical recounting and become a chron-
icle of a woman’s courageous journey to her self-
hood and identity amid adversities. Thurmond
keeps her grounded to the historical times. Her
language, especially the dialogue she recounts,
clearly reflects the time period. However, he bril-
liantly imbues her with modern sensibilities. Her
shame over her family’s history of keeping en-
slaved people, her choice of words (“enslaved
people” instead of “slaves,” for instance), her
treatment of her maid, Mary, all reflect those sen-
sibilities, and I find this aspect of the novel par-
ticularly intriguing.
The novel has become a beautiful tribute to
the strength and resilience of a woman who was
forced to chart her own path amid uncertain and
unforgiving conditions during and after the Civil
War. Readers may also find it interesting to know
that the author, Thurmond, is related to the his-
torical figure and a major character in the novel,
Frank Thurmond, and his curiosity about Frank
led him to Lottie Deno, whose story he couldn’t
help telling.
--Khem Aryal
##### Peep Light: Stories of a Mississippi River Boat Captain. By Lee Hen-drix. (Jackson, MS: University of Mis-sissippi Press, 2024. Pp. xviii + 196,
acknowledgments, riverboat glossary,
prologue, epilogue, references and
credits, $99 hardback, $22, paper-
back)
As you have driven over a Mississippi River
bridge, you have seen towboats pushing their
barges up and down the Gathering of Waters.
You might mistakenly refer to both the towboat
and the tow as a large barge. A river boat captain
will set you straight. A barge is one of the main
vessels attached to a tow. The towboat pushes the
barges, and the crew members eat and sleep on
the towboat, not the barge. Captain Lee Hendrix
sets these kinds of misconceptions straight in his
witty and vibrant collection of reflections, essays,
short stories, and reminiscences of half a century
of life on riverboats. Rather than imagining what
life is like on a towboat, Hendrix brings you
down from your car into his wheelhouse where
he seats you on the liar’s bench and relates won-
derful stories. The book blends genres as many
of the chapters work as memoirs, but he also in-
cludes short fiction, eulogies, essays, and other
forms of writing. The peep light refers to blue
steering light that pilots use for navigation. It is
an excellent metaphor for the book’s content,
and Hendrix’s personable style of writing gives
readers luminous experiences with stories and ac-
counts of captains and crews who work the river.
After college, Hendrix began working on the
barge lines in 1972 as a deckhand. Personal ex-
perience narratives relate the challenges of work-
ing on a barge as well as the excitement of
learning the occupational practices and folklore
within this working community. Some of the
most fascinating writing gives readers a great ap-
preciation for the skills of deckhands. Hendrix
and other crew members worked six hours on
and six hours off in all
kinds of weather, and
the work is often dan-
gerous. Lines can break
and cables can break
free. A loose barge is
dangerous, and a
snapped cable or line
can be deadly. Hendrix
conveys his apprecia-
tion for the deckhands’
skill, and his prose illustrates the respect and
camaraderie between captains, mates, and deck-
hands. Stories of events that he experienced as
well as the accounts of others include original
text that is new to this book as well as entries
published in Big River Magazine and other
publications.
[](https://kb.astate.edu/uploads/images/gallery/2026-08/image-1786389036257.png)
Within a few years, Hendrix began training
to become a river boat pilot. His description of
learning the requisite skills evokes the writing of
Samuel Clemens and other cub pilots. He gives
readers an understanding of both the direct con-
tinuity to time-honored ways of training pilots as
well as new developments within the past half
century that have influenced the education and
certification of river boat captains. His own work
is diverse and fascinating. He piloted towboats
for the barge lines on the Mississippi and other
rivers. He worked as an outdoor educator who
taught students about the importance of water-
way ecosystems. He piloted excursion boats, in-
cluding the steamers the Mississippi Queen and
the Delta Queen. His accounts of serving as a cap-
tain on a casino boat in Davenport, Iowa, during
the 1993 flood offer a unique insider’s view of
one of the worst floods in American history. As
he gives us accounts of his range of experiences,
readers gain a microcosm of the history and cul-
ture of those working on river boats, with an ex-
cellent blending of vivid descriptions with
engaging reflections on the changes in the indus-
try. His career concluded with his work for the
US Army Corps of Engineers prior to his retire-
ment in 2014. He continues to write and speak
on the river, and Peep Light is a culmination of
his skills as a writer and raconteur.
There are numerous ghost stories and leg-
ends associated with the river. It is not uncom-
mon to hear tales of ghost ships and supernatural
occurrences. “Chapter 10: Jimmy Dan” stands
out a bit differently from the rest as it is his fic-
tionalized reworking of a legend of a ghost ship
that he mined from the writing of Benjamin Bot-
kin. As do other legends, his story begins with a
realistic narration that sounds plausible. The
narrative shifts and becomes an exciting account
of a huge tow that became unmanageable. The
resolution to what could have been a major dis-
aster shifts his realistic writing into the fanciful.
Hendrix’s work of short fiction, here, works well
as he blends accurate description with his artistic
license. He also gives readers more prosaic ver-
sions of riverlore and legends. One of the most
widely believed ones is the account that Lou-
isiana Governor Huey P. Long purposely re-
stricted the height of the Upper Baton Rouge
Bridge to less than 110 feet of clearance above
the Low Water Reference Point. Those crossing
the bridge have wondered why it is 62 feet lower
than the nearby I-10 Bridge, located four miles
down river. The story goes that Long limited the
height to prevent ocean-going vessels from going
beyond the port of Baton Rouge. The story
sounds good, and even folklorists have believed
and told it, but it isn’t true. Hendrix debunks the
tale and suggests why it persists within the wider
context of Louisiana’s political history.
Hendrix includes this type of engagement
with perceptions about river life. There is an in-
credible amount of in-group knowledge and
argot that is part of river culture. Some of this
knowledge is fodder for jokes and pranks. The
author describes being sent on trips for non-ex-
istent equipment like keys for locks and ratchet
stretchers that are also part of other groups’ oc-
cupational folklife. These accounts index other
elements of the depth of the culture of those who
work the river. One of the most salient examples,
here, is his response to a seemingly intriguing
question from a member of an audience who
asked which Mississippi River bridge he thought
was the most attractive. His answer turned into
“Chapter 13: Ain’t No Such Thing as a Purty
Bridge.” Although he does acknowledge the ar-
chitectural appeal of numerous bridges, Hendrix
gives us towboaters’ perspectives. Namely, each
bridge poses numerous challenges in navigating
and maneuvering vessels underneath them. He
explains how the bridge in Vicksburg, Missis-
sippi, is especially hazardous. Challenges in navi-
gating through it include dangerous currents,
lack of visibility, and a wide variety of obstacles
known only among seasoned members of the
community. This chapter vividly illustrates one
of the main elements of piloting a river boat.
Forty-barge tows are not uncommon, and the size
of the complete tow can be larger than most
freighters crossing the oceans. Whereas captains
of ocean-going ships may only have to steer
through bridges when leaving or entering a har-
bor, river boat pilots are constantly working to
navigate numerous bridges, locks and dams, pil-
ings, and other obstacles throughout a twisting
and turning river course. Peep Light takes readers
out of our view from atop the bridge and into
the decks and wheelhouses of the vessels plying
the inland waterways. His memories expressed in
his excellent storytelling serve as a lively entrance
into a view of this world from the perspective of
life on the river.
--Gregory Hansen
##### A pooka in Arkansas. By Ed Madden. (Washington, DC: The Word Works, 2023. Pp. 81, $19.00, paper-back)
The pooka of the title is a borrowing from
an Irish folktale work by Yeats, according to
whom, quoted in the front matter, the creature
“seems essentially an animal spirit” and a sort of
shapeshifter. (The Irish variant is púca.) Madden
appropriates the term to signify queerness while
growing up in a home and community hostile to
a healthy self-awareness of it. The volume is
roughly chronological, from boyhood to college
and later, suggesting a verse memoir, though all
poetry is by its nature fictive. The poems mine
experiences and bravely reveal aspects of them to
readers. Although they may be especially helpful
to those living in similar situations—there is more
than one pooka in Arkansas—they have a com-
mon humanity for anyone interested, as the
poems adeptly place readers in the speaker’s
shoes.
In the tradition of such poets as Jo McDou-
gall, most of these poems are set in the Arkansas
Delta, where Madden was born and raised. They
lend credence to the famous Flannery O’Connor
idea that anyone surviving childhood has enough
experience to fuel a writing career. Scattered
poems take readers elsewhere, including Ireland
and Brazil, the setting of the beautiful ode
“Horses,” but the Delta poems hit hardest. The
opener, “When I was a young animal,” both links
the shapeshifting pooka with the speaker and es-
tablishes the family rice farm as the main setting.
The speaker as a young animal learned, as we all
do, from watching
others. There is no guar-
antee the things any of
us learn when we are
young will be positive,
humane, or true, and
throughout the volume
the speaker reflects on
rejection by community
and, most painfully, by
family. The persona
slides back and forth easily between past and
present to reveal consciousness in operation, the
mind trying to understand itself.
[](https://kb.astate.edu/uploads/images/gallery/2026-08/image-1786389243043.png)
Madden also follows a long tradition of po-
etry about farm work extending back at least to
Hesiod, who was raised to be a shepherd, and
Seamus Heaney, in whose “Digging” the nar-
rator-son concludes he will not follow his farmer
father but dig instead with his pen. This collec-
tion is a tribute to Madden’s father, whose final
days and death are central to Ark (2016). The title
poem represents the speaker’s merged identity as
he pauses in caring for his father by walking
alone near his family’s house to speak with his
partner on the phone. Some of the poems are set
in a deepening dusk as fires of various sorts, as
large as an entire field and as small as his father’s
cigarette, blaze in the dark and evoke a vividness
with which the reader can almost smell the
smoke. The poems expose wounds but also, as a
book-length narrative, reconcile the past with the
present. The volume suggests that some wounds
have healed or scarred over, while others remain
tender. The therapy session of “Eclipse” draws
this idea forward by employing a snippet from
poet Mary Oliver: “this, too, was a gift.”
These poems show how familial wounds cut
the deepest and remain the longest. Some of the
complexities of familial relationships unfold
sequentially. For example, while the father in
“Unless thou get a son” is a “god,” the mother,
in the next poem, “Fairy Tale” (the first of three),
is “a mortar and pestle, / grinding her children
as she sees fit” (pp. 8, 9). In a later poem, she tells
the speaker, “You know deep down you’re really
ashamed” (p. 49). In the subsequent poem, pre-
sumably in another session, the therapist urges
him to stop “doing your family’s work of shaming
you” (p. 50). A prose poem follows beginning
with “I am not the son you wanted” and is filled
out with an extensive list of additional “I am
nots” (p. 51). A later poem suggests a possible
open lane for improved mother communica-
tions: hurting words cannot be undone, but
“now / we’re trying to say it different” (p. 62).
Not ashamed, many of the poems affirm and cele-
brate sexuality. “Instructions” (subtitled “on meet-
ing the Púca, 1”) states, “Some of us were made to
be ridden, riddled, riven” (p. 12). In the second
“Instructions,” the speaker is in a forest as a wolf,
though there is never just one: “You are no
longer a child / You are no longer a boy / or a
girl” and you “[s]wallow what you don’t yet
know” (p. 25).
Most of the poems are brief, direct, and em-
ploy unembellished language fitting for bare
thoughts—the technique and content are well
paired. (Against this grain slightly is the second
“Instructions,” which references Deleuze and
Guattari’s “Becoming Animal”: “Becoming is al-
ways of a different order than filiation.”) The lan-
guage is unfussy, unadorned, and unpretentious.
It is easy to overlook the strong versification here,
the poet’s exploration of free verse, including sur-
prising enjambments such as
. . . biscuits big as a cat’s
head, threaded with cheese. (p. 71)
The lines also tend toward brevity and ellip-
sis, but the longest and perhaps central poem,
“Burning the fields,” stretches out the lines and
employs one of many light/dark settings in the
volume as an extended poetic excavation of
family relations. Communal judgments enforce
family ones, as the poem invokes an Arkansas law
against sodomy, death for black men, prison for
whites, though “[i]n 1873, the racial distinction
was removed.” This reads like a punchline, but
it is sheer horror. Here, as in the other poems,
Madden uses nouns to evoke ideas and does not
rely heavily on adjectives to do the lifting or
create the images. A white bowl turned face
down on a table in a blue kitchen resembles a
moon to create an image reflecting a sad child-
hood. Such rich images enforce memories of re-
jection, though a small boy cannot know about
sexuality in a context so hostile to self-realization.
Many of the poems are variations on the shape-
shifting pooka, but the theme does not wear
thin, and the word count is perfect. Other sur-
prising images and phrases unfold, e.g., a gar,
“slick, prehistoric, its eyes gone dead,” on his
father’s trot line (p. 46). He makes the difficult
look easy.
One tornadic evening in late March 2023,
Madden gave a reading at the A-State Delta Sym-
posium, as he has previously. Having grown up
in the area, neither he nor extended family
members at the session seemed alarmed. That af-
ternoon the supercell threatened his hometown
of Newport as it proceeded southeast to destroy
much of Wynne. I told Madden I enjoyed his
book, which I read that day with one eye on the
local TV weather, that I admired its cover (art-
work by self-taught Michael Krajewski), appreci-
ated the humor of the poems, and cited some of
the Irish writers he teaches regularly. (He teaches
Irish literature, queer studies, and creative writ-
ing at the University of South Carolina.) One ex-
ample is derived from a therapist’s statement, on
which the narrator reflects: “All you can do is the
best you can do,” though the narrator cannot
keep the phrasing straight—lesson lost? The recur-
ring “Fairy tale” poems are other examples, as is
“Sometimes it’s all I think about, too,” which
states, “Every time I masturbate / I am rethink-
ing hegemonic masculinity” (p. 44).
Having grown up in a devout Church of
Christ family and written about it, it’s unsurpris-
ing that religion plays some role in the poems,
though the references are mostly in passing. Else-
where, Madden has written that for him, religion
is “something going if not gone” (Arkansas Review
50.1 2019, p. 6). Near the first of “Burning the
fields,” a line suggesting the narrowness that
sometimes accompanies religious faith provides
its own key: “A man stands, his head encased by
a tiny church—as if the church were a vise, a
mask, a hood” (p. 30). Quite differently, the first
“Psalm” refers not to the Old Testament poetry
but to “porn revelations,” a phrase that surely
applies to many (all?) people at some point in
their young lives, perhaps earlier and more graph-
ically in today’s “information age.” The poem
praises the magazine ads of Orioles pitcher Jim
Palmer, “whose underwear ads were holy writ of
adolescence” (22). The poems show how levity is
a sort of comfort in almost any situation and sug-
gest a healthy ethos.
By the end of the volume, the speaker has re-
alized a strong sense of satisfaction in a home
with a loving husband—a scenario less imaginable
in late twentieth-century Northeast Arkansas—as
in the collection’s beautiful final poem, “My hus-
band who is not my husband.” The title charac-
ter is at the stove tending to “slabs of meat /
skittering in grease”; he is the speaker’s “hot
water bottle,” and in moments of tenderness, he
does not wish the speaker to see him crying at
the Dublin airport (pp. 71, 72). So concludes this
slim volume, which merits a large audience ev-
erywhere. Arkansans should celebrate the art of
a local son who has, for better and worse, not for-
gotten his roots. He has developed his talents
and given them back to us in his poetry.
--Bryan L. Moore