Memoir of a Vietnam Vet who returns home and tries to find his bearing, but butts heads with his father and friends and falls into a career of horse training.

Off Track: or How I Dropped Out of College and Came to be a Horse Trainer in the 1970s While All My Friends Were Still Doing Drugs

Biographies & Memoirs

McGarrah, Jim

Professionals & Academics

Blue Heron Book Works

Poetry. RUNNING THE VOODOO DOWN by Jim McGarrah is one of the winners of the Elixir Press Third Annual Poetry Awards. "...a book of intense, highly crafted, and haunting poems in the voice of a wild man shouting the unflinching truth about the congested speedway of contemporary living he is roaring through"--Jack Myers. His work has appeared in such publications as Connecticut Review, North American Review, and Southern Indiana Review.

Running the Voodoo Down

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Elixir Press

Jim McGarrah's The End of An Era is an insightful, heartbreaking and, at times, hilarious account of his struggles as a veteran in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. In his extraordinary wounding, healing blues song, this combat veteran sings for family, for lovers, for friends, and, always, in each line, for the soldiers gone in another era and the ones now dying in our own.

The End of an Era

Leaders & Notable People

Ink Brush Press

In Jim McGarrah's third poetry collection, the present is often eclipsed by the ghosted past of Vietnam.  These vital poems dwell in the inevitable privacy of being human, and it is in these starkly singular spaces-walking the dog, truckstopping for breakfast, closing the bar at 2 am, visiting Vietnamese children suffering the effects of Agent Orange-that McGarrah wrestles truth with music, grit and wry humor. As the poet sways between sobriety and stupor, bearing witness to the horror of being alive and the horror of going on, he too leads us through that slim midnight portal into rugged grace, where a worn ball cap becomes a whiskey-washed Eucharist and the cast of the missing creates the genius of absence. When transcendence comes, it is no lavish exaltation, but something far more real and astonishing.

Breakfast at Denny's

Jim McGarrah was born into the halcyon bubble of post-World War Two small town America, a bubble burst by the trauma of the Vietnam War in which he fought as a marine. His recall of his youth in Princeton, Indiana will take you through the looking glass of a Norman Rockwell magazine cover. His recall of a nighttime patrol in the MeKong Delta rice paddies will make your hair stand on end and bring you to tears. Misdemeanor Outlaw is a split personality of a memoir: part anecdotal paean to a seeming Paradise Lost, part wised-up epiphany about how things really work. It is a read you will come away from questioning even what you are most fond of.

Misdemeanor Outlaw: A Confession of Life

Veteran of a bad war, child of the sixties counterculture, philosopher, family man, and failed spiritual leader for a congregation of two, John Grant struggles to make sense of his existential malaise and survive its strangling hold on his life while working for the United States Postal Service. Grant is a dope-smoking, darker Walter Mitty. His one touchstone with reality, wife Rhonda, leaves him and he must struggle alone with the complicated questions that often arise in a mid-life crisis, surrounded by a cast of characters even stranger than his own post-Vietnam delusions. Contending with peanut-crunching, gun-toting postal clerks, rabid dogs, his best friends bad acid trip and a postmaster who wants him fired, our hero navigates the streets of a fictitious Indiana town with the same hilarious and lyrical alacrity as the author, poet Jim McGarrah, navigates through the language in this, his first novel.

Going Postal

Publishamerica Inc

When the Stars Go Dark

Main Street Rag

The Truth About Mangoes is the fourth book of poetry by award-winning poet Jim McGarrah. Sixty new poems explore the difference between the ways we see the world we live in and and the way the world is. These poems take the reader along for the ride with grit and humor, From a dead coyote on an Arizona highway to a monologue from the ghost of Hunter S. Thompson, the language mesmerizes and the observations fill us with empathy for our fellow humans.

The Truth about Mangoes

Lamar University Press

A Balancing Act is the fifth book of poetry by award-winning poet Jim McGarrah. With new and selected work, this book explores the cultural landscape of America, both past and present. These poems take readers on a journey through the gritty backroads of America--through a childhood fraught with beautiful tension, the experiences of a soldier in Vietnam and its aftermath, and the reflections of a man who has seen both himself and the world around him change. Part beat, part confessional, and part jazz, these poems memorize with craft, wit, and perhaps most poignant, their honesty.

A Balancing ACT

The poems included in the poetry collection reveal the subtle sense of the mystery, beauty and love for the elemental simplicity of life. . In these poems, we find how the poet withdraws from outer experience to concentrate on the inner. These poems are full of amazing and deep imagination. It is evident that in all these poems there is present a rich style and a variety of melodies to attract the readers.\nBIO 
Jim McGarrah is the author of ten books. Running the Voodoo Down won the Elixir Press Poetry Prize in 2003. His newest collection of poems, A Balancing Act, was published by Lamar University Press in November of 2018. A memoir of war entitled A Temporary Sort of Peace (Indiana Historical Society Press) won the national Eric Hoffer Legacy Nonfiction Award in 2010. Blue Heron Book Works published McGarrah’s newest nonfiction book in May, 2017 entitled Misdemeanor Outlaw.His poems and essays have been published in The American Journal of Poetry, Barcelona Review, Bayou Magazine, Cincinnati Review, Collateral, December, Innisfree, North American Review, and Southern Indiana Review among others.

You Can Never Go Back to the Turtle Back Inn

Rochak Publishing

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by McGarrah, Jim. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by McGarrah, Jim