Extended Play, by John Waddy Bullion

Poetry, chapbook, 20 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Less a collection of poems than an accumulation of riffs, John Waddy Bullion’s Extended Play mines the history of popular music for odd scraps of trivia and myth and turns them on their collective ear. In these pages, Tom Waits wails about climate grief, Bob Dylan addresses the Chamber of Commerce in a dusty Texas border town, and Hank Williams, Sr. soliloquizes about marriage (and getting hit in the head with a frying pan). Elsewhere, a game of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies triggers a creative crisis, and a large Tex-Mex feast served by ZZ Top leaves a German shepherd howling unanswerable questions into the cosmic abyss.

Employing a variety of poetic forms—erasures, pastiches, prose, found poetry—Extended Play replicates the electrifying thrill of finding an obscure, foreign-only CD single from your favorite band’s favorite band in the bargain bin at Circuit City.

John Waddy Bullion is the author of the short story collection This World Will Never Run Out of Strangers (Cowboy Jamboree, 2025). His writing has appeared in the McNeese Review, X-R-A-Y, the Texas Review, Pithead Chapel, Hunger Mountain, Vol 1. Brooklyn, and elsewhere. He lives in Fort Worth, Texas, with his family. Visit him online at johnwaddybullion.com.