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Book of Grass
Jim Brummels has his “lip back.” This book shows
how he’s found adventure in his journey, describing it in such
plain talk it’s downright lyrical. Take a bite out of
your pigmeat sandwich and listen to the barn swallows “sneezing
and excusing themselves.” Although Brummels knows his
way around a tack room, he acknowledges the security of academic tenure
even as he scuffs his boots down its halls. And
while he can evoke the heartbreak of a hardscrabble life and can
sing the praises of a night under a rural moon, he’s clear-eyed
enough to look at himself and write, “I can’t believe
how full of it I am.” It’s a relief to read such
refreshing poetry from Nebraska, the Great Plains, the Earth. --Kathleene West, Poetry Editor, Puerto del Sol
The sonorous essence of rural America, Jim
Brummels’ storytelling
voice elucidates, once and for all, “that the wild/geography
we long to learn always lies just within.” And if we’re
fortunate enough to locate it, like, say, finding dynamite “by
match-light in the shed,” we’ll realize that it’s
comprised of an almost infinite diversity of landscapes and landmarks. Book
of Grass (call it “cowboy poetry” and/or call it “cosmos
poetry”) guides us, movesus, physically, emotionally,
spiritually – east, west, north, south, outward and, especially “within” – through
country we’ve seldom, if ever, covered. In short, we’re
talking the gospel of unfenced ground, of the wireless wide-open. Jim’s
poems speak truth into all lives, into all deaths, into every deep
belief in the hereafter. --Paul Zarzyski
Read the foreword by William Kloefkorn...
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Cut River
I get the same pleasure from reading Amy McInnis's Cut River that I do from looking at the intricate construction of a bird's nest, or in hearing a hidden vireo singing at the top of a tree; her poems have that same unerring now-ness and clarity. "The woods should have a different name at night, something that tells us it will be harder to walk out the same," she says in one of her poems. That we are changed irreparably by our threshold crossings is one of the many difficult truths of this dark and lovely book. - Nancy Eimers, author of A Grammar to Waking
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Ode to Brian
Ode to Brian is simultaneously a very funny and eerily horrifying book - a sort of Mormon college Animal House crossed in a wierd hybrid with Kafka. You will be shocked that the narrator does not murder Brian before the calm stoical last page. I may have myself if trapped with this roommate from hell. You too . . . What is Brian? An emblem of sloth and gluttony straight from the Middle Ages, maybe Piers Plowman. There's more news of modern life and the world of the young in this charming and entertaining poetic sequence than you are likely to find almost anywhere else. Read it and learn . . . and pass the Doritos. - Bill Holm, author of Coming Home Crazy
As the opening poem tells us, this book is "The Study of a 26-Year-Old College Student." You will never forget Brian, who eats and plays video games while you get all the education. Jon Lee's voice and craft are clear and straight- forward. A pleasure to read. - Ken Brewer, Utah Poet Laureate
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interstices
Laurelyn Whitt's poems have appeared in various journals, including The Spoon River Poetry Review, Puerto del Sol, The Malahat Review, and Poetry Canada Review. She is the author of two prize-winning chapbooks, Words for Relocation (Will Hall Press, 2001) and a long dream of difference (Frith Press, 2001).
She currently lives in the Wasatch Mountains near Spanish Fork, Utah, and is a professor of Philosophy and Integrated Studies at Utah Valley State.
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Gutter Flowers
Don Welch moves among the poor like a modern day Whitman who has mastered the fine art of pruning. The poor, he says, "need the dump and truck of love / to walk on too." With a minimum of words he evokes a maximum of feelings and sympathies. The rest of us need the poet's words to bring us those places we have neither the time nor the courage to explore. — Bill Kloefkorn
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Alvin Turner as Farmer
It was 1972 when Alvin Turner first ambled onto the page and charmed his way into the hearts of readers. The voice behind the mask belonged to William Kloefkorn, first-book poet and assistant professor at a small Methodist university on the Plains. Alvin Turner as Farmer was an instant success — the initial printing sold out in weeks — and decades later is a classic of American poetry. In the meantime, Alvin Turner's creator — now Nebraska State Poet — has gone on to write more than twenty books, mostly poetry, charming readers the whole long and wonderful way. Is there a more complete man in poetry than Alvin Turner? Strong, tender, witty, and wise, the man himself is as rich as the poetry which presents him. For every step Turner's head takes in one direction, his heart takes an equal and opposite step. This is the blanace of the anicents, as if Classical Greece had dropped in on Attica Kansas. Is that so strange? - Don Welch, author of The Alley Poems
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The Great American Road Show
No one poet travels the entirety of the road that is American poetry. We stop for gas or pie or a flat tire or because we can't keep our eyes open any longer. We pause to fork up the crumbs from our plate, or we're distracted in the midst of looking for all the pieces of the jack. While we sleep on some hard motel bed, other travelers pass us in the night. This is a community unto itself, but the members survive in a larger culture. We get off the road for a while or forever. A poem begins and that poem ends. What goes on forever is the road. What never ends — can't end as long as one voice speaks out its vision — is poetry. - JV Brummels
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Shadowboxing
In this new collection of five stories, one of America's master poets delves again into the lives of idiosyncratic and diverse characters of the Plains. William Kloefkorn introduces us to a teen-aged babysitter shadowboxing his way to adulthood, a waitress and the hero who rescues her from her grief, a young couple just finding love, an old man desperately trying to locate the threads that tie his life together, and a professor fumbling to make a connection to real life. The voice that tells of these people and their place is filled with compassion and good humor.
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Frankenstein Was a Negro
Frankenstein Was a Negro is lyrical psalm — it sings the blues and has the scat and soul of the Cotton Club. It's a testament to the true working class — hands tattered and torn; eye squinting bright. Reminiscent of Baudelaire, father of the prose poem, this collection mesmerizes and haunts and becomes terrifying to its own creator
Charles Fort holds the Paul W and Clarice Kingston Reynolds Chair in Poetry at the University of Nebraska — Kearney. A MacDowell Fellow and Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize winner, Fort has been recognized by Poetry Society of America and Writer's Voice. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Nebraska Review, Mississippi Review, The American Poetry Review, Georgia Review, Colorado Review, and elsewhere, and have been anthologized in Best American Poetry 2000, Best of Prose Poem International, and The Carnegie Mellon Anthology of Poetry.
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Disciples of an Uncertain Season
At the time of Larry Holland's death in March of 1999, Disciples of an Uncertain Season, published just the fall before, had virtually sold out. This volume reprints Disciples in its entirety with the addition of a number of poems previously published available only in magazines and journals. An introduction and afterword by his friends and fellow poets Red Shuttleworth and Neil Harrison have been added as well. This enterprise has been a labor of love, and this collection is dedicated to the friends, family, and students of Larry Holland.
... takes the sort of chances that create poems that must be read and read again ... - Red Shuttleworth, Sawtooth Saloon
He possesses the talent to make a poem's pulse thump against the silence of its own making. - Don Welch
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The Logan House Anthology of 21st Century
American Poetry
The many voices in this collection signal the range, richness, and diversity that is American Poetry. With no one idiom, no one landscape, no one "American Experience" to confine the imagination, the poets in this collection speak many tongues, proving the wisdom of Walt Whitman's assertion, in the preface of Leaves of Grass: "The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem." In plurality is a vibrant, idiosyncratic, generative force. These diversepoets attend to many truths, grounded in the body of the earth, clarified by hard experience, and illuminated through language that is at once rough and memorably distilled. Here is crassness and eloquencein creative juxtaposition; here are lyrics that span modes as different as narrative and allegory.
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A Time to Sink Her Pretty Little Ship
Logan House Press is proud to announce the release of William Kloefkorn's first book of short stories, A Time to Sink Her Pretty Little Ship. Some things have gone awry in the sleepy burgs wherein William Kloefkorn's characters dwell. The unassuming title character of "Newberry's Boy" has been, for some time now, violating our most sacred taboo. "The Pisser Into Clear and Faraway Streams" refuses to die quietly. "In Baptizing the Shirt" a woman does what she can to bridge the irreconcilable difference in her marriage. A paper boy in "A Time to Sink Her Pretty Little Ship" plots a singular act of patriotism.
William Kloefkorn was named the Nebraska State Poet in 1982. He has published more than twenty volumes of poetry. In 1978 he won the Nebraska Hog-Calling Championship. He recently retired from the faculty of Nebraska Wesleyan University after a long and distinguished career.
A Time to Sink Her Pretty Little Ship is Kloefkorn's first book of fiction. This collection of short stories as expected, has raised quite a commotion in literary circles. Kloefkorn's prose is crisp and clear, drawing on his familiar poetic voicing, as if written in a language all his own. Don't miss out on this exciting opportunity. Order your copies today.
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...all these bullets, separate as nuns,
eager as Reynosa whores...
"Red Shuttleworth is a phenomenon among the literary figures of the American West. More outlaw than cowboy, he's authored umpteen chapbooks but never a book. Equal parts circuit-riding preacher and shootist, he's spread the Good News of the True Poets of the West while drawing a long-barreled critical bead on the montebanks, charlatans and sundry other long-winded peddlers of ineffectual patent medicnes. A modern-day itinerant journalist, he's found a running handful of poetry magazines from Texas to British Columbia. Poet, editor, story-teller, playwright, pilgrim to the grave of Wyatt Earp and prophet honor-bound to wander the Great American Desert and beyond the Divide ...
More than anything else, his poems celebrate a domestic life on the frontier edge of the American Dream. It's precarious footing, to be sure, but preferable to the alternative. For three decades now, he's kept him and his — his family, his friends and readers — out of the boghole of the American Nightmare." — JV Brummels
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Here from There
Stories by Lisa Sandlin, Bruce Nelson, Larry Holland, Neil Harrison, Cheryl Meir, Jim Reese, Curtis Meyer, Pat Keating, Red Shuttleworth, Mary Raff, and JV Brummels
"Here from There is a welcome addition to our growing collection of American literature. There is wit and grit, humor and nostalgia, awe and awfulness in the scope of these stories; we've seen nothing better to give us a sense of ordinary and extraordinary life in America. Reading Here from There helps us further understand Americans while showing us the ambiguities of American culture which can only further the cause of international cross-cultural understanding, world peace and harmony." - Edward Kurlyand, Dean, Faculty of Foreign Languages Barnaul State Pedagogical University, Barnaul, Russia
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Story
"Neil Harrison has created some of the finest poems to come out of Nebraska. His voice is insistent, his images precise and the sensibility behind the poems is generous and smart. No one since Don Welch has done the short poem so perfectly. No other poet knows the various parts of the state — their topographies, their flora and fauna — so intimately. These are poems to mark the passage of time, to note change and to ask what remains constant." — JV Brummels
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