Byline: Eric Hanson; Staff Writer TUESDAY: The bitterly contested ground of Missouri during the Civil War has been fertile recently for novelists who find there the dramatic elements perfect for their purposes. As in Kevin McColley's novel of a few years back,...

JILES, Paulette. Stormy weather. Read by Colleen Delany. 10 cds. 11.5 hrs. Harper Audio. 2007. 978-0-08-125646-2. $39.95. Cardboard; plot, author notes. SA Jiles's second novel is set in 1930s Texas, suffering from a drought and the Great Depression. Jack Stoddard moves his...

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Paulette Jiles flashes words through train windows. Every poem in her first book, Waterloo Express, is a frame in a travelogue. The poems are points in the locus of a journey which takes the character everywhere in search of an author…. The secrets of each new landscape are released with terrific energy as the poet tears through earth and air in the search for herself. She becomes the vehicle she rides, burning steel and cresting waves, learning and looking. In the process, she leaves the feminine st...

Although Jiles … uses time to organize Waterloo Express and comments on such aspects of it as "Clocks," images and motifs of place, space, and travel also provide some of the volume's most important patterns. Jiles' fascination for such images is indicated in the title and opening poem where the poet hops on the "Waterloo Express," rips up herself and her identity—"there they go—a toe, a finger, my coat"—as the train rips &#...

Paulette Jiles' Waterloo Express is made up of blues, shouts and meditations at the razor's edge. It's a sometimes electrifying fusion of folk and sophistication. The author is often presented in folk outline: she laments a string of busted love affairs, hits the road again and again to forget, and can talk as sardonic and lowdown as any blues momma. Yet the TNT and agony she drags around come crackling out in images of manic brilliance, controlled by a frequently superb ear. Jiles move...