The Long Road to Self: Kathleen Florence’s Prayers With a Side of Cash
In Prayers With a Side of Cash: Poems While Driving Across America (MoonTide Press, 2025), Kathleen Florence reinvents the road poem for a restless new century. The journey begins in New York and ends in Los Angeles, but the true destination is inward—the shifting self that emerges mile by mile through encounters with strangers, ghosts, and the cracked asphalt of America’s psyche.
The premise sounds familiar — an odyssey across the highways of the United States—but Florence approaches it with fresh eyes and a distinctly female gaze. Where Kerouac sought transcendence in motion and Whitman found democracy in the open road, Florence looks for belonging in a country that no longer recognizes itself. “The accidents of identity,” one poem suggests, “are how we become who we are,” a line that could serve as a thesis for the book.
Her language moves between lyric and grit, between the sacred and the commercial. The title itself, Prayers With a Side of Cash, signals this collision: a recognition that in contemporary America, the spiritual and the material are always in uneasy conversation. The poems capture that tension without losing tenderness. Each rest stop, each diner booth, each stretch of highway becomes both literal and metaphorical terrain –a mirror for how the self fractures and reforms in motion.
Florence’s road is populated not just by people but by atmospheres: billboards, half-lit motels, truck stops, and the desert’s vast silence. Through these, she constructs a poetic topography that feels both archetypal and utterly now. The collection’s rhythm—its sense of drive—comes from the tension between moving forward and looking back, from the human need to keep traveling even when the map no longer makes sense.
Occasionally the book’s wide thematic reach — identity, money, faith, geography –sprawls as much as its subject matter. Yet even when the focus loosens, the momentum never flags. The poems’ voice, equal parts pilgrim and witness, keeps the reader engaged, hungry for the next horizon.
What distinguishes Florence’s work is its refusal to romanticize the road. Instead, she listens to it — to the hum of tires, the static of AM radio, the quiet prayers said at red lights. In doing so, she reframes a quintessentially American myth through an intimate, contemporary lens. Prayers With a Side of Cash is less about escape than recognition, less about motion than becoming.
For readers drawn to poetry that traverses both geography and consciousness — fans of Anne Waldman, Joy Harjo, or Diane di Prima — Florence’s collection offers a compelling and timely itinerary. It’s a book for anyone who has ever wondered what it means to move forward in a country perpetually in transit.
While a resident of New York City, Richard Modiano became active in the literary community connected to the Poetry Project where he came to know Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, William S. Burroughs and Ted Berrigan. In 2001 he was a programmer at Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center, joined the Board of Trustees in 2006, and from 2010 to 2019, he served as Executive Director. The Huffington Post named him as one of 200 people doing the most to promote poetry in the United States. Modiano is the winner of the 2022 Joe Hill Prize for labor poetry and is a Pushcart Prize nominee.
