Betrayal Creek

Kip Stratton's Betrayal Creek is contemporary confessional poetry at its finest. It lays bare the inward landscape of an "ordinary man / with spurs and a saddle-scarred soul" through a lover's betrayal, into the depths of depression, and finally out into the glorious Texan sunlight beckoning on the other side of a window. What's most striking about these poems is their ability to connect the personal to the universal--the suffering of one man to the suffering of a country in peril. Betrayal Creek grieves the loss of a love, the loss of life amid a global pandemic, and our collective lost humanity at the hands of racism and gun violence. The collection ends with the forlorn yet resilient speaker speeding off into the open road in a red Cadillac, offering a kind of symbolic hope that our world, too, can survive such darkness and emerge wiser, stronger, and scarred.