Kevin J. McDaniel spent much of his childhood growing up in a stucco house on Middlebrook Road in Augusta County, near Staunton, Virginia. He attended Riverheads High School where he played football, track, and participated in forensics, which cultivated his love of poetry. To that, he remarks, "Preparing and then reading Poe's Annabel Lee at a forensics meet left an indelible impression on me, one that has stayed with me throughout the years." Later on, while pursuing his B.S. in English at Radford University and then his M.A. at Virginia Tech, he developed a literary palate for Aldous Huxley, Sylvia Plath, Robert Frost, William Wordsworth, and Philip K. Dick. Family Talks is his first chapbook of poems, some of which draw from his childhood in the "old stucco house" in the poems "Buttercup Warriors," "Stucco Shack" and "Rubbernecking." Other poems in this collection take root in his experiences of being a father, a son, a brother, nephew, husband, and grandson. To that end, the poems range from the birth of his daughters, "The day I thought of the dead" and "Preparations for a Child," to hearing his mother's account of rural superstitions in "Hearing Old Country Superstitions." The speaker in "Hitchhiker Elvis in Memphis" provides a lighthearted memory of his father, but "A good memory rents a house beside bad" gives readers a brief snapshot of the day he visited his father in a funeral home. For him, a poem is a time capsule where he paints images, or drops in a specific word that serves as a placeholder of a particular time in his life. Yet, the image or word is accessible so that the reader can see his or her own experience. He believes poems have distinct personalities and, therefore, a life that lives on through readers who share in these stops and travels along with the poet.
