In ‘Otherwise, My Life Is Ordinary,’ Bobby Byrd has taken ordinary things and people and turned them into something extraordinary.
El Paso resident Bobby Byrd founded Cinco Puntos Press.
By Jonah Raskin | The Rag Blog | June 20, 2014
[Otherwise My Life Is Ordinary: Poems by Bobby Byrd (May 2014: Cinco Puntos Press, El Paso); Paperback; 121 pp; $15.95.]
British poet Tony Connor once told me, “A poet at 17 is 17. And a poet at 71 is a poet.” Connor published his first book of poetry, With Love Somehow, in 1962 at the age of 32. I met him in 1965 when he published his second book, Lodgers. His eighth book, Metamorphic Adventures, came out in 1996. Connor has stayed the course.
So has Bobby Byrd, the Memphis-born poet who has lived in El Paso, Texas, with his wife and children, since 1978. Soon after the Byrds arrived in El Paso, Bobby and his wife, Lee, founded Cinco Puntos Press, which has published half a dozen of Bobby’s books, including White Panties, Dead Friends & Other Bits and Pieces of Love; The Price of Doing Business in Mexico; On the Transmigration of Souls in El Paso; and most recently, Otherwise, My Life Is Ordinary. Son Johnny Byrd runs the press these days.
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