Farewell to Armor Reviewed by Butch Hamaday

Farewell to Armor exposes an earned beauty, present in all things, transcending muted and lost love, isolation, unflinching introspection and long days put in at pay and wage jobs. The 56 poems in the collection leave the theatrics behind. Shedding artifice and armor, Trainer takes the reader with him down bad roads of loneliness and points to a promised land of solitude. The celebration of survival is a strong theme throughout Farewell to Armor, but the collection also finds Trainer quietly lamenting what his survival has cost him.
Through a series of heartbreak and a string of mind-numbing day jobs, Trainer finds that in shielding his heart from the world he has hidden it from himself. “Don’t ever stop fighting,” he implores, perhaps suggesting that his real struggle is within, that only by revealing himself to the world can he reclaim his heart.

-Butch Hamaday, Norwester

Jim Trainer will read  from his latest work at a very special night of poetry and spoken word, presented by the Moonstone Arts Center, with Don Bajema and Maleka Fruean, at the Brandywine Workshop 728 S. Broad Street Philadelphia, PA 19146 on Wednesday December 11 at 7pm.  For more information check out the events page on Facebook.

Shrieks of Paradise, Correspondence&Rails#10: Dear Butch

And so it goes. ‘Twas ever thus. A pound of flesh and an eye for an eye on the too-small working class streets of my first love has made a war of my heart. What a waste. And what a dumb decade we spent in the pent-up rooms and shut-down shacks at the corner of nowhere&oblivion. It’s a wonder we survived at all.
There’s nothing left to do but take our Crown. Don our coat of wounds and crank the twitching hours into a masterpiece of pain&resistance. Resistance would’ve worked. It could have been the way but now the body gives out and the mind grows tired of the chase.
We won’t need their paper-thin platitudes of false love anymore. Nor their comradery.  Nor their praise, pride or prize for half-bravery.
We have starved to the truth long enough. Now let us feast.

Welcome to the mountain chain.
Yr Brother,
James