All Seats Fifty Cents is a
tribute to nostalgia that projects reverence for Universal Monsters,
Battlestar Galactica, The Incredible Hulk, The Golden Girls, Pee-wee
Herman, and, of course, Dolly Parton. In work that The Boston Globe
calls funny and celebratory, Stephen Roger Powers, a child of the 1980s
whose life was informed by movies and television, also imagines the home
lives of the castaways on Gilligan?s Island. The lyric and narrative
poems in this third collection erupt with the kind of adventures, both
real and imagined, that any boy coming of age in that decade longed for,
and serve as paeans to wanderlust in the way they flicker and shake
around the world to land in unexpected places like Ireland, Highclere
Castle, Pigeon Forge, the Rocky Mountains, and Jekyll Island.