Cross Point Road

Rodney Nelson entered into a "late flowering" at an age when most poets are content to write blurbs and accept honors on what they have already written. The turn of the millennium marked a return to poetry for him-he had been a novelist and a playwright-and to his own amazement, new work would not stop coming. At the same time, the publication of his poetry in burgeoning electronic journals introduced him to a wider readership than he had ever known. Nelson's recent work has seen print, too. There have been chapbooks and books. But Cross Point Road is his first major collection. "It would not do to try to put content or theme before art," he claims; however, readers will note the prevalence of western American landscape behind and within his lines, especially that of his native northern Great Plains. Cross Point Road is in part Nelson's tribute to the world he has found outside the windshield.