Back to the Wine Jug

In Back to the Wine Jug, Joe Taylor, author of the comic verse novel Pineapple, returns to the form with a tour de force of wit, erudition, and earthy imagination. A novel in verse. News of the political turmoil and division in the living world above has reached even Hades. The shades there want to help as they can, and Lord Hades agrees to send a representative up to Birmingham, Alabama, accompanied by Diogenes, he who is ever searching with his lantern for an honest (wo)man. Victoria Woodhull, who once ran for President of the United States on a free love platform, gets chosen as the representative. But Lord Hades cannot be trusted, for he also sends up J. Edgar Hoover, the infamous director of the FBI who could never get communists out of his bonnet. These three meet up with Alonzo Rankin, an undercover detective, Dr. Eddie Truelove, a neurologist from UAB’s school of Medicine, and Judge Roy Bean Too, a politician who famously chases fourteen-year-old girls. Hoover and Bean concoct a plan to install a granite monument of God holding the Ten Commandments in every incorporated Alabama town. God is also waving a .45 automatic in his other hand. Woodhull and Rankin counter as they can, Victoria trying to spread the gospel of free love.