A Little Smoke

"Sometimes reading Bill Gainer's poems is like finding a note full of familiar sounding tales left on a barstool. The whole story is there. Change the names, and it could be yours. You know the girl with the long fingers, why the buzzards are circling, which ghosts are traveling with you, and why you stay for another round."

-Pat Grizzell, Sacramento Poetry Center

"Gainer opens up the body of American life to lay out the guts of our behaviors, the heart of who we are; what didn't seem important to us in living our lives suddenly becomes what shaped us in a crazy world of forgotten truths and morality. We become vulnerable observers of our own life in Gainer's poems."

-Chris Olander, Poetic voice of Northen California