W. K. Stratton Livres

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.

In 1956, at age 21, Floyd Patterson became the youngest boxer to win the title of world heavyweight champion and then, later, the first ever to lose and regain it. From the Gramercy Gym and wild-card manager Cus D'Amato to a final rematch against Ali in 1972, Patterson's career spanned boxing's... číst celé

"Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, named one of the greatest films of all time by the American Film Institute, is the story of a gang of outlaws who are one big steal from retirement. When their attempted train robbery goes awry, the gang flees to Mexico and falls in with a brutal general of the Mexican Revolution, who offers them the job of a lifetime. Conceived by a stuntman, directed by a blacklisted director, and shot in the sand and heat of the Mexican desert, the movie seemed doomed. Instead, it became an instant classic with a dark, violent take on the Western movie tradition. In [this book], W.K. Stratton tells the fascinating history of the making of the movie and documents for the first time the extraordinary contribution of Mexican and Mexican-American actors and crew members to the movie's success. Shaped by controversial director Sam Peckinpah, and starring such visionary actors as William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Edmond O'Brien, and Robert Ryan, the movie was also the product of an industry and a nation in transition. By 1968, when the movie was filmed, the studio system that had perpetuated the myth of the valiant cowboy in movies like The Searchers had collapsed, and America was riled by Vietnam, race riots, and assassinations. The Wild Bunch spoke to America in its moment, when war and senseless violence seemed to define both domestic and international life. [This book] is an authoritative history of the making of a movie and the era behind it."--Jacket

The poems and prose deal with pain, sorrow, regret, disillusion, history, family breakdown, and Western landscapes. The title piece of 'Colo-State-Pen: 18456' is an epic-length poem dealing with Stratton's grandfather, a life-long criminal who served a prison at the Colorado State Penitentiary.

W.K. Stratton continues his exploration of alter ego alleyways in his second book of poetry, Ranchero Ford/Dying in Red Dirt Country. Written in both verse and prose-poem form, the pieces in the book form a poetic concept album dealing much with time and place and family, both real and imagined. The poems draw images from a tough society populated by oilfield roughnecks, bootleggers, brawlers, and outlaws. Ranchero Ford/Dying in Red Dirt Country is bookended by long pieces exploring loss in the unforgiving territory.