Southwest Minnesota: A Place of Many Places
This book's immediate predecessor drew on the writings of many southwest Minnesota authors to create a portrait of the land and its peoples. In Southwest Minnesota: A Place of Many Places Amato and Pichaske explore the region's rich culture in their own words. From Amato's analysis of regional lead cities like Worthington and New Ulm to Pichaske's meditations on smaller towns like Minneota, Slayton, and Hanley Falls, the authors examine the ways this region has reacted to the changes and challenges of the late twentieth century. Along the way, they explore tiny points of interest like baseball diamonds, coffee shops, cemeteries, and small-town ethnic celebrations. Extended essays like "A Meditation on Enclosed Space," and "Seen and Unseen Faces" offer penetrating reflections on the long arc of history in Southwest Minnesota and on the natural and constructed landscapes.
The Crow on the Golden Arches
Leo Dangel
(Read by Garrison Keillor on October 13, 2004, broadcast.)
These thirty-nine all-new poems represent Dangel's work since Home from the Field, and will probably be the poet's last book-length collection. They take Dangel in a more formalist direction - some are actually sonnets - reflecting the influence of poet Phil Dacey, Dangel's colleague at Southwest Minnesota State University. Older influences like Nebraska's Bill Kloeforn and Illinois' Dave Etter are also still visible, although in these poems, as in earlier work, Dangel has his own voice.
Neighborhood
They’re all here, exactly as you remember them. A butcher named Polacek, a baker named Vesecky. Doc Cermak, General Practitioner. Tony the Shoemaker, Shorty the Locksmith, Joey the Peddler. The ice cream man. The softball diamond and the roller rink. The neighborhood pub. The neighborhood theater. The old Sokol Slavsky gym, where you do gymnastics. St. Joseph’s, where the mass is still chanted in Latin. The Savings and Loan. The Bohemians. The Italians. The mushroom hunters, the wine makers.
Winter Book
Home from the Field
Leo Dangel’s language is simple and homespun, his characters are recognizable and down home, his world is the perfect image of southwestern Minnesota and eastern South Dakota. While Dangel’s poetry invites comparison with that of Dave Etter and William Kloefkorn, his work is unique in its wry understatement, vivid scenes, restrained feeling, fond tolerance for eccentricity, and vestigial prairie populism. Among his poetic characters, Old Man Brunner and Arlo loom especially large as archetypal curmudgeonous bachelor farmer and callow farm lad respectively.
Essential Dave Etter
The Essential Dave Etter is the distillation of a career which began in 1966 with the publication of Go Read the River and ran through hundreds of published poems, two dozen books, numerous awards, and translations in German, Polish, and Japanese. The Essential Dave Etter contains the essence of an essential American poet, one who has influenced virtually every younger rural Midwestern poet. Priced for use as a textbook in workshops and writing classes, high school to college, this introduction to Etter’s work exhibits his range of voice, material, and technique.
More about Essential Dave Etter >>
Looking for Sheena Easton
In his newest collection, this prolific Illinois poet explores new possibilities in structure and form, and reminds us again of his art’s ties to the techniques of jazz and popular culture. The old Etter ear for spoken idiom is everywhere evident, as are the poet’s ties to his Midwest place.
Evil Corn
This collection of hard-edged prose poems takes no prisoners. Louis walks the tightrope between the sacred and the profane with humor, anger, and compassion, all dispensed with a startling clarity of vision. These poems, written from 1999 to 2004, derive from Louis's self-imposed exile in the rural deadlands of southwestern Minnesota.
Fielding Imaginary Grounders
This manuscript, publication of which was delayed by Sergeant Patrick Gass, dates to the late 1990s. It belongs to Kloefkorn’s explorations of his personal and shared history in small-town Kansas, revisiting and expanding material that will be familiar to readers of his two memoirs This Death by Drowning, Burning the Imaginary Child, and earlier collections of poetry. The poems, filled with Midwest idiom and cadences, favor the three- and four-line stanza with which Kloefkorn is so adept.
Sergeant Patrick Gass
In Sergeant Patrick Gass, Chief Carpenter: On the Trail with Lewis & Clark Nebraska State Poet William Kloefkorn recounts the story of the Lewis and Clark expedition, 1803-1806, St. Charles to the Pacific Ocean and back. He bases his poems on the long out-of-print journal kept by Sergeant Gass. “I’m attracted to the sergeant’s poetic grasp of understatement,” Kloefkorn writes in his preface, “to his love of timber, to his capacity for loyalty—not only to the expedition as both a military unit and a family, but likewise to his hatchet and his flask, both of them returning intact to St. Louis with the man who nurtured and protected them.
Tale of the White Crow
Tale of the White Crow is a compelling coming-of-age memoir, recounted in diary format, set in Riga, Latvia, in the 1990s. The book takes its name from the author’s (typically adolescent) sense that she does not “fit in,” and her oft-repeated desire to change from a “white crow” into . . . not a beautiful swan, but just a normal black crow like her schoolmates. Naturally, Iveta turns into the loveliest of lovely swans, but the journey takes her through a couple of schools plus the University of Latvia, through various adventures and misadventures with friends male and female, through the death of her father, through baptism into and escape from the American-based “International Church of Christ,” and through several near-disasters in Russian disco clubs.
Southwest Minnesota:The Land and Its People
Southwest Minnesota: the Land
and the People, a 128-page coffee table book, is a portrait of the
region in photographs and the words of Robert Bly, Carol Bly, Phil Dacey,
Leo Dangel, Hamlin Garland, Paul Gruchow, Jim Heynen, Bill Holm, Garrison
Keillor, Meridel Le Sueur, Frederick Manfred, Joseph Nicollet, Tim O’Brien,
Ole Rolvaag, Barton Sutter, Southwestern Minnesota is a haunting landscape
marked by rich farmlands, forgotten villages, patches of vestigial prairie
and slough, surprising rivers and wooded rills . . . and, everywhere in
the countryside these days, signs of abandonment and depopulation. The
photographs in this book are elegiac, and many of the texts—written
by some of the region’s and the nation’s most respected writers—reflect
upon an issue best expressed by Frost: “what to make of a diminished
thing.”
Historian Joseph Amato has argued that the Minnesota countryside is presently
undergoing a reconfiguration as profound as the original land-taking a
century ago. At such a juncture self-assessment is especially helpful.
Who are we? Where have we come from? What is our history? What are our
roots? What crises have we weathered? What resources remain?
UB03
This book about Outer Mongolia was written and printed in Ulaanbaatar, Outer Mongolia. It thus truly embodies its subject. However, the true uniqueness of UB03 (Ulaanbaatar 2003) is that is an unsentimental, unromanticized portrait of a country which is still the edge of the known, looking out at the unknown. From the photo of a ger district on the front cover to the photo of the author, herder, and camel on the back cover, and through 150 pages of words and four-color photos, Pichaske describes the Mongolia he experienced on his Fulbright lectureship at National University.