"You can't get there from here" is the kind of line a local delivers with a straight face to a lost driver, and Dave Bonta turns it into the rule of his whole poem. Nothing here goes in a straight line. The title, "In the Sticks," borrows the slightly sneering slang city people use for remote countryside, and the poem then earns a more complicated respect for the place. Its central idea is that a backwoods landscape is neither empty nor simple. It is tangled, damaged and unsentimental, and it still produces beauty on its own schedule.
The form helps make that argument. The poem runs in two-line stanzas with short lines, no punctuation and a lowercase "june," and it never rhymes. Sound does the work rhyme might have done: the clipped alliteration of "luck or lumber," the grinding consonants of "bump and grind," the soft sway of "rambling rose." The couplets act like the forks of the opening line, each pair splitting off from the last. The sentences also drift. "Unless you go sideways first… you must run out… get saved… lose an argument… wonder…" reads like a list of conditions for belonging, a slow initiation in which the newcomer has to be humbled before being taught anything.
The imagery in that first half is low and oblique. A knight in chess moves in odd, indirect jumps, and a long-tailed weasel hunts in the stiltgrass close to the ground. Both suggest that the way in is to stop being direct. The humour is dry and specific: a "discount preacher" saving souls "behind the barbecue shack," a speaker who loses "an argument / with the moss." You can't win against something that moves that slowly and never stops.
Then the tone darkens. "Wonder what horrors / lie hidden beneath your feet" is followed by "wrapped in duct tape / sealed in mason jars." These are homely objects, and the jars once held preserves, but here they contain something nobody wants to open. The poem never says what is buried, and the line break after "horrors" leaves the dread hanging before the domestic detail arrives. Judging by the imagery, the horrors might be waste, secrets, or both.
The turn comes at "but you learn," and what you learn is noise. "Mountaintop draglines / or fracking rigs" suggest a hilly region worked over by mining and drilling. Bonta describes their rhythm as a "bump and grind," a phrase from burlesque, which turns industrial extraction into a crude, repetitive show. The chainsaw "mutters / between screams" is the poem's most striking piece of personification, since it lets the machine and the felled tree make sound at once. The creek, by contrast, can "rise from a lullaby to a roar," and Bonta uses one verb for a whole change of mood. When it floods, it washes away "all / our post-industrial middens." A midden is the word archaeologists use for an ancient rubbish heap, so calling our waste a midden quietly imagines us as a vanished culture whose leftovers are being studied. The pronoun matters too. Until now the poem has said "you," but here it says "our," and the reader is pulled into the mess.
The ending folds everything into a pun. "Back of beyond" is an old idiom for the most remote place imaginable, and the line break gives us "the small of the back" first, so the landscape suddenly has a body. The rambling rose blooms in its most tender, private spot. "Rambling" is also what the poem has been doing all along, wandering and branching until it arrives somewhere unexpected. The rose's bloom "every june" is quietly cyclical. It doesn't undo the buried horrors or reverse the damage, and the poem doesn't pretend it does.
That restraint is what makes the poem worth reading. It deals with extraction and pollution without a sermon, and it avoids both city contempt and pastoral sentimentality. Humour, local idiom and a few exact images carry the argument, and the final bloom is offered as something that persists beside the ruin, not as a cure for it.