The Essential Big Red

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The Essential Big Red: Selected Poems by Lynne Walker (143 pages) is a selection of the work of a Toledo-based writer whose poems chronicle her life from her childhood in the "Dogpatch" area of Sylvania, through her early dating and first marriage, her introduction to the writing life, her personal and poetic development, and into her "menopause phase." Insightful and delightful, these poems instruct and entertain and give readers' one artist's unique view of life in the fast and slow lanes of Toledo, Ohio.

Northwest Ohio novelist, poet, and essayist, Howard McCord says of Ms. Walker's book:

The Essential Big Red brings the reader into a world rich in wit, earthiness, and compassion. Our old world is a bawdy, riotous place as often as it is the scene of tragedy, and Lynn Walker's poems present the full array of the human story with humor and understanding.

And UT-UAC Press literary editor Joel Lipman says:

Mythic Big Red is mundane as Toledo tract house motherhood and as flamboyantly erotic as Frumpy's cinema dreams of Paris. Oh, what a hugely human trip it's been to work as Lynne Walker's editor as these poems evolved from manuscript to book.

The following review of The Essential Big Red by Dr. Tom Barden appeared in the Spring 2006 issue of UT Alumni News.

The Essential Big Red: Selected Poems by Lynne Walker (University of Toledo - Urban Affairs Center Press) Lynne Walker (Univ Coll '81, MLS '89)
This is a collection of poems by a Toledo-based writer whose subject is her own life as viewed though her larger-than life persona: a red-haired wild woman named Big Red. She takes us from her childhood in the "Dogpatch" area of Sylvania, through her early dating and first marriage, her introduction to the writing life, her personal and poetic development, into her "menopause phase." The poems depict one artist's unique view of life in the fast and slow lanes of Toledo. Walker writes as if she is talking to a friend over coffee - or more likely, scotch - about the stuff of her life in the cadences of everyday speech. But her everyday life is one she lives to the hilt and her language is subtle, precise and often achingly beautiful. And the "take" she has on relationships, family, love, politics and aging is both wise and joyful.

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