- Publisher : Independently published
- Publication date : August 6, 2025
- Language : English
- Print length : 209 pages
- Available formats
eBook
Paper Cover
Hard Cover
Six-pack Psalms
a Sawdust Sage Book and the first of the
Barrooms, Beers & Backyard Barbecues Collection
It raises a toast to the great unifiers of the rural Midwest—cold beer, warm friendships, and the occasional mosquito. From Midwest nostalgia poetry to laugh-out-loud campfire stories and poems, James Allen spins verses that wander from campgrounds and softball fields to bonfires and beaches, always circling back to the dented aluminum Coleman cooler at the heart of it all.
These aren’t sermons for saints—they’re stories for anyone who’s ever roasted marshmallows over questionable flames, played backyard games with questionable rules, or shared a cooler with the kind of friends who never let the truth get in the way of a good story. If you enjoy humorous poetry collections that celebrate beer, bugs, and backyard shenanigans, this one’s for you.
Funny, nostalgic, and a little irreverent, Six-Pack Psalms is proof that sometimes the holiest moments happen in lawn chairs, and the best hymns are sung off-key under the stars.
Crack a cold one. Pull up a chair. These psalms are best enjoyed where the fire’s warm, the night’s young, and the cooler’s still heavy.
This book is part of the Barrooms, Beers & Backyard Barbecues related collection — a group of companion titles connected by back-porch humor, small-town storytelling, and the kind of everyday wisdom that tends to show up around coolers, campfires, barstools, and backyard tables. Each book stands on its own, but together they offer a fuller picture of the characters, memories, and hard-earned observations that shape this corner of James Allen’s work.
The Origin of Six-Pack Psalms
Six-Pack Psalms came out of a stretch of pure nostalgia.
I found myself thinking about the way we used to spend time with friends in the late seventies and early eighties—camping, drinking beer in farmers’ fields, hanging around bonfires, scooping the loop, and doing all the ordinary things that felt completely normal at the time and somehow became part of the memory of growing up.
The details kept coming back: the coolers, the cars, the bugs, the music, the laughter, and the stories that got better every time somebody retold them.
It was also a particular moment in time. We were coming of age during the years when Iowa’s drinking age had only recently been 18, then moved to 19, before eventually rising to 21. That legal and cultural transition was part of the backdrop to those late-seventies and early-eighties memories.
That nostalgia became poems, reflections, and a few exaggerated stories about friendship, youth, and the particular kind of freedom that existed before anybody was carrying a phone in their pocket.
Six-Pack Psalms grew from wanting to capture that feeling before it faded—the sense that sometimes an old cooler, a dirt road, and a handful of friends were enough to make a night memorable.