Nebraska State Poet William Kloefkorn and David Lee, distinguished Utah poet, collaborate in this volume of 135 pages of poems from their respective American landscapes. Kloefkorn’s poetry is well known to Midwesterners for its candid glimpses of rural life, and for its sincere emotional impact. David Lee’s poetry is an affectionate parody of the dialect of small-town folk, and of their ability to elaborate limitlessly on a simple situation or idea. Together, the two writers synthesize in a single volume the most interesting aspects of both the West and Midwest.

Kloefkorn’s poems take us from a locker room shower to a thundershower on the morning of a funeral, and through experiences as diverse as eating popcorn from a stolen collection plate to treating a grandmother’s ganglionic cyst with a leather-bound bible.

“…Pure American folk and wonderful.”—David Curry, Apple

“…one of the most powerful pieces of writing, of any kind, that I have read to date. This is Midwest poetry at tis best.”—Tom Montag, Margins

Lee’s poems introduce such characters as Reverend Pastor Brother Strayhan, who “preaches” that he should get half-price discounts at local stores; Uncle Abe, a wanderer who carries with him only a sack of candy and a childhood memory; and Harold Rushing, an industrious soul who works six and a half days a week, barely pausing after a broken arm and a heart attack.

“Reading Lee’s poetry is like sitting on a wide porch in the summer with a favorite uncle you don’t see often and listening to him ramble along with tales of the local townsfolk.”—Library Journal

“Impolite, raffish, and pathetic, these poems all are, once you start hearing the dialect, great reading.”—Ray Olson, Booklist

135 pages
$9.95 paper
0-944024-30-0

Two features of this book are especially interesting. One of them is stylistic: the seamlessness Kloefkorn achieves by printing poems with no titles, no dates, and with the judicious use of foreshadowing. The long months and years of the expedition melt into an on-going process, eternally present like the rivers followed by the Expedition. The book is almost one long poem in many sections, a structure toward which Kloefkorn has been moving across his previous two collections of poetry. Equally interesting is the way Kloefkorn merges large details of history—drawn from Gass’s diary and other public records—with intimate details, emotions, and stories suggested by the diary but attributable largely to the poet’s intuition: Gass’s complex emotional relationship with Sacagawea and her husband, his senses of duty and honesty, the metaphors of craft, wood, and tools.

94 pages
$12.00 paper
ISBN 0-944024-43-2