buck naked is the opposite of hate Sheila Na Gig Editions (2026) by Joe Cottonwood
Comments by Editor Sharon Waller Knutson
It isn’t often that I read a title of a book and instantly know who authored the book without even reading the byline. The minute I read: buck naked is the opposite of hate, I knew it was a Joe Cottonwood poetry collection full of crazy characters we love to love and hate and sympathize with as we read their raw, honest, heartfelt and heartbreaking stories. Joe has a talent for telling a story that makes me laugh and cry at the same time. Like Hemingway, in language anyone can understand, Joe explores the human condition through the lives of everyday people he meets in his childhood and as a carpenter, neighbor and nature lover. As we frolic through fun redneck country, he introduces us to bullies, barefooted Blue Grass lovers, beer drinkers and blue-collar workers with dirt under their fingernails. He gives a new perspective on life. It seems the older Joe gets, the wiser he gets. I treasure the book he autographs: To Sister Sharon, even though he is recovering from shoulder surgery and read it cover to cover, feeling like I am with family as I listen to the doves chattering by the pond and imagine Brother Joe doing the same in his house under the Redwoods.
About the book by Joe Cottonwood
Buck naked poems wear the innocence of youth, the wisdom of nature, the experience of craft. They come of a lifetime in the building trades, of sawdust embedded beneath fingernails. Of the questions of children and the adventure of their raising. Of the wisdom of birds, the pawprint of raccoon, the loyalty of dog and the wariness of cat. Of romance, of a lifetime love. Of digging trenches, connecting wires, banging nails. Of a reverence for trees, of the guilt of slicing wood, of the pleasure of providing comfort and shelter. Of ancestors, of ghosts. Of, each day, seeking the humane.
Praise from fellow poets.
I don’t often envy other writers, but there’s Joe Cottonwood. To read his poems, you’d think he’s lived every life I imagined but never quite got to. It isn’t just that he’s a mesmerizing storyteller, it’s that he shows you in poem after poem what it means to be human, to have a sense of compassion, to be a good person because it’s right. And does it in poetry that says “Stay here a while. See what I see, feel what I feel.” His reverence for nature and for craftsmanship, for the good that is in the people he writes about, is a quality that is too seldom found. My advice? Sit down with this book of poetry and step into a world where even pain can be gentle. Then thank Joe for letting you in.
—j.lewis (Jim Lewis): Editor of Verse-Virtual and author of “all these things are broken.”
I never know where I'll be going when I read a Joe Cottonwood poem. It's as though he pulled up in a pickup truck, shouted "Get in!" and off we barrel down a dirt road chunky with rocks and storm-torn branches, a ragtag assemblage of dogs barking in the back. Joe's poems are fresh and unroasted, like he just thought them up a minute ago, right there in your company. When you join him while he smoothens pine "sweet as sugar" or solders a copper pipe outside a McMansion, you'll share Joe's reverence for bird's-eye maple, the warmth of water, and for the English language itself.
----Shoshauna Shy, author of Shortcut to Thief River Falls
Like his fellow Californian John Steinbeck, Joe writes of common people with an uncommon grace. Joe's poems are tales of daily life — of his wife and children, his friends and neighbors. He illuminates the elemental truths which connect us all. Reverent and loving. Joe's humanism and strong heart suffuse his work, and through his poems he finds, embraces, and shares with us that bit of the sacred which is woven into the ordinary.
— Roderick Bates, Editor, Rat's Ass Review
The 92 pages of poems is divided in four sections: In Muddy Water, Rough Cut, Swallowed by Lions and Let Go Like a Dove.
Some of my favorite poems:
My Song Americana
I come to you barefoot
I chew bluegrass, drink corn
My rain is muddy water
My hands are raw from picking cotton
My lungs are black with coal
My farm is dust
I follow rivers by raft,
herd longhorns by horseback,
ride boxcars over endless plain
I killed the native and the buffalo
I regret
I sing of what remains
I am outlaw—I seek justice
I celebrate love—I betray it
I despise the rich—I want riches
I raise children in rags
They outgrow my front porch,
my tumbledown shack
I shame them with my twang,
my holler of blues
My children trade tractors for Teslas
They bring the south north
They take the west east
My children return with fresh children
who throw off shoes, who paddle kayaks,
who jump into muddy water
and come up clean
Lester and Maggie and the 4-Wheel Bed
Gruff gray Lester and Navaho Maggie
have no offspring but treat me like one.
For Lester I knock down a wall
and install fat rubber wheels under
the walnut monster of a double bed
they've shared 60 years—so he can roll
Maggie to the dining room and kitchen.
Magpie of Dawn, Lester says.
She keeps an eye on me.
Maggie's delighted, room to room
joking and chattering sometimes in Navaho
and you get used to the scent of urine.
Rolling is difficult for Lester who limps
and later more cumbersome with oxygen tanks
so I'm replacing cupped floor boards
when Maggie who is watching me work
points to a pair of coyotes—
one large wary male, one smaller calm female—
outside the window sitting on haunches
by the broken-down tractor staring right at us,
not unusual for a ranch house outside town but
then we hear a gurgling sound like water in a drain.
Lester a big man leaps to Maggie's side.
Bends his head to her heart while outside
in broad daylight those coyotes start to howl.
The two. Aroo-oo.
It tingles.
The air itself seems to glow.
Lester grabs his rifle from the wall and runs
to the window but those coyotes don't flinch.
Aroo-oo.
He lowers the gun with shaky hands, says
They're calling her home.
A couple weeks later after the service
Lester in his old wedding suit tight and ragged
hands me a cardboard box containing the wheels
he's removed and there's a note:
For the next.
Help them go home.
Now I'm no coyote but that box is
on the top shelf in the garage.
I'm telling you, son, so you'll know.
Walter Johnson fires a fastball,
Elvis Presley crowds the plate
At a tender age you learn to glaze windows
when you pitch tennis balls to the brick wall
of your house. You learn curveball and fast,
you try the knuckle, sweep glass.
You learn to hate the mulberries
that squish over the pitching mound.
You play next door with Mary Anne Morningstar
and you love the Elvis songs blaring
from her tinny transistor radio
as much as you hate the menacing hillbilly accent
of her full bourbon father who yodels
“Love me tay-ender, Love me troo-a-oo-a-oo.”
You find you can improve your arm
only as far as your body will allow,
one fat pitch can erase ten good ones,
there’s always some batter with a better eye,
some coach with a mean streak.
You learn your back yard was formerly
farmland owned by Walter Johnson,
one of the greatest pitchers of all time.
Your mulberries fed his chickens.
May his spirit feed your arm.
You develop hair down there
and see Mary Anne burst into tears
when you ask to see hers.
You jump back as she launches
a stone like a fastball into the radio
smashing it to jewels of plastic.
You learn she hates Elvis
and she hates her dad for his pelvis
and she loves God instead,
and you think maybe you love Mary Anne
like Elvis loves his momma
in a tender non-icky way.
You learn to cut glass, to curl putty with a knife.
You learn Walter Johnson after baseball
became an incompetent small time politician
and Elvis in Vegas turned squishy as mulberry.
You learn the easy passage from genius to fool.
Constellations fade with the dawn.
Remember Mary Anne.
Remember the stars.
……
Note: When Walter Johnson pitched for the Washington Senators he had a farm in Maryland. The house where I grew up was built on that farmland.
Working graveyard shift
my sleep is nuts
so on nights off I walk the dog at 3 a.m.
hoping a German shepherd normalizes me
except Quinn growls at the cop
who stays in his cruiser
talking through the open window
just letting me know somebody called
from one of those dark houses
but there’s no law against walking at 3 a.m.
so have a good night.
Sometimes I jog the golf course under quiet stars.
I let Quinn off the leash.
Together we run over grass.
Even without a canine nose I love the smell,
the sound of sleeping snoring chlorophyll.
One night I’m running when the sprinklers start.
Immediately before I can think better
I pull off my clothes, every stitch.
I run. So free! It’s fantastic, the dog agrees
until I trip
and roll
but that’s fantastic too
except the bruises
and suddenly the spotlight, the cop.
I have mud on my body, grass in my hair.
The sprinklers keep chug-chug-chugging in circles
splat with cold bullets across my butt
as the cop writes out a ticket
for an unleashed dog. That’s all,
because there’s no law against
running through sprinklers
on graveyard shift
when you’re white.
Nov 22
My brother with dementia
outside a bakery arrested for peeing
into a newspaper rack and forgetting
to refasten his pants which brings him
not to a police station but a hospital
where I find him and take custody.
The nurse asks the standard questions
to see if he is oriented such as “Who is president?”
“That asshole.”
“Which asshole?”
“Um—the ugly one.”
“What year is it today?”
[Shrug.]
“What month is it?”
[Shrug.]
“Do you know what the day is?”
“No, what?”
“Today is Thursday, November twenty-second.”
“They shot him.”
“Who?”
“The president. They shot him.”
The young nurse is puzzled.
“Kennedy,” I explain.
“Well,” says the nurse, “do you know where you are?”
“Yes,” my brother says, “I’m in the fucking hospital.”
The nurse smiles. “Okay, you may go.”
“They shot him,” he mutters all the way home.
Because some things you never forget.
Shirtless Dusty
I first meet Dusty on a beach
beside the Chesapeake Bay
in this photo where
he’s dating my cousin Liz
who suddenly grew a body.
Dusty’s the one with chest hair.
I’m the kid with glasses.
In this photo Vietnam shirtless again
he’s on a river boat patrolling
writes Stay in college.
Stay the hell out of here.
Next here’s him shirtless and Liz shirted
in the house he restored on steelworker’s pay
building war machines that float.
Bankers stole his pension
when they looted Bethlehem Steel.
Combat memories haunt
while Dusty raises goats
until the city shuts him down.
Here’s Dusty an old man on Facebook
with his face peeling off, flesh
flaking under cammo fatigues
posting paranoid gun-rights crap
so I unfriend him.
Here at the Chesapeake Bay again
Liz is dumping Dusty’s ashes
from a borrowed sailboat.
Agent Orange kills him
though the doctors won’t admit it.
His life like firing a rifle at the sky:
a disturbance the air closes over.
We open our shirts,
we feel the bullet strike.
Here. Right here.
The Opposite of Hate
Singin’ in the shower.
Peanut butter. Daisies.
Weathered barn boards
are the opposite of hate.
Playmate. Roller skate.
Rhyme is the opposite of hate.
Balloons. The only thing
you should ever blow up
is a balloon.
Skinny-dips.
Swimmin’ hole, hot afternoon.
Buck naked is the opposite of hate.
Steak, Well-Done
Selected on the hoof
after peering in the eye,
how Uncle Merrel shops for beef.
Walked by rope to an Amish man
who butchers, loads 500 pounds of meat
to Merrel’s 2-wheel trailer pulled by
smoke-popping bare-bones tractor
to a freezer in town.
A few cuts Merrel brings home and cooks
special for us, his west coast nephew and family
who followed the Oregon Trail backwards
for dinner which is mid-afternoon
on farm country time in Missouri.
Back home we don’t eat meat
but we don’t mention.
Uncle Merrel is a patched old machine
pushed too hard for too long,
threads of flesh bound in scraps of denim.
Sweats red oil. Shakes when idle,
then at top speed he groans and grunts.
Steak, says Merrel, oughtn’t be bloody inside,
you want it cooked but if you order well-done
in a restaurant they get mad at you
and flame it too fast so it’s burned outside
but still bloody in the middle.
We appreciate we didn’t have to evaluate
this steak in the eye. Uncle Merrel
cooks with time, with sizzling fat.
Well-done, still juicy but not bloody.
The farm way. And golly it’s good.
The Stranger in the Car Behind
A mighty gust of fog rips 3 bicycles
from the rope-and-bungee web atop my van
to fly past the rear window as my gut drops
in a center lane on the Golden Gate Bridge
so I stop. God help me, I stop.
Jump out. Run back
to where the stranger in the car behind
blessedly not a tailgater braked in time
now has put on his blinkers and hustled forward
as together under steel cables
while wet wind howls with diesel smoke
as cars roar by on both sides
while an oil tanker glides beneath
he says not one word in the quick desperation
helps gather 3 bent bicycles from the roadway
which I stuff on top of 3 scared children
as the stranger to whom I said not one word
not a thank you not a moment for it
runs back to his car in the mad din of about 30 seconds
while I hop into the driver’s seat
and stomp on the gas and — gone.
And the stranger whoever
never asked to be a hero
pumped adrenaline scrambled amid traffic
where no trucks or busses plowed into us
survived and drove on and — gone.
So to you right here right now reading this poem —
Yes, you —
To all you strangers in all the cars behind
let me say in advance:
Thank you.
Bless you for what without hesitation you will do.
Thank you so much.
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