Bøger udgivet af Backwaters Press

Although ghosts of all kinds haunt this collection, these poems also look forward and outward into a world where social inequality and environmental disaster meet the possibility of metamorphosis.

Winner of the Backwaters Prize in Poetry, this collection teems with creatures and cosmic phenomena that vivify and reveal our common struggle toward faith and identity.

Through sonnets and a long sequence, the poems of Two Open Doors in a Field are constructed with deliberate limitations, restlessly exploring place, desire, and spirituality.

Eclectic essays about American Poetry and poets.

"MRS. BELLADONNA''S SUPPER CLUB WALTZ contains work that is a rarity in American literature: a trilogy of prose poems. Charles Fort explores the Other through the use of an elaborate persona. ''Darvil,'' he notes, is a ''composite of devil and evil,'' but he gives him a noble lineage: ''direct descendent of Leo Africanus.'' In deconstructing the great patchwork quilt that is American culture, Fort undermines any notion of the Other while understanding all too well the reality of it. His poems are jazzy riffs through Fourth of July bombast, Native American lore, Afro-Caribbean rhythms, and the detritus of a post-war materialism. And his comedy is Swiftian; he is most brutally funny when he is angriest."—Donald Soucy

2014 Nebraska Book AwardThe Untidy Season: An Anthology of Nebraska Women Poets takes its readers through the lush alphabet of Nebraska poetry—from Adkins to Zumpfe—with selections of poetry by nearly 90 native-born or transplanted Nebraska writers who write and live fearlessly and with great skill. Their topics range from the beginnings of life to the end—family relationships, loss, misunderstandings, work, trust, betrayal, love and hate, bereavement. Through those lives—because of them—these poems emerged, an indelible record of the triumph of the human spirit.The four editors of The Untidy Season, each an accomplished poet in her own right, searched for poems of clarity, honesty, passion, and brilliance. One of the editors wrote: “We were drawn to work that both celebrated and subverted the ‘typical’ Nebraska experience, the ‘typical’ experience of motherhood, the ‘typical’ experience of womanhood. I suppose my own aesthetic leads me to be drawn to work that challenges ‘typical,’ but much of the work we experienced over that year of reading submissions forced me to engage with my own stereotypes and see inside them.”You will agree they found what they looked for when you read these marvelously bracing, gritty, and wise poems.

"I want a book of poems to act like a genuine book and not just a miscellany of the poet''s most recent work willy-nillied between covers. Susan Elbe''s THE MAP OF WHAT HAPPENED is just such a thoughtful, integrated collection, lovingly (and, I''m betting, painstakingly) assembled, occupying a space/time continuum all its own from beginning to end. This book is so much more than a sum of its estimable parts; there is such palpable life here because there are so many human lives in its pages. And this poet has a real stake in showing us the various ways in which they honestly matter. By the sheer power of her down-to-earth empathy and the resilience of her language, she makes her people our people, too."ΓÇôDavid Clewell, judge

"The figure of the infant Moses-child of slavery, exile, captivity; lying in an ark of woven bulrushes ''daubed... with slime''—is the figure for this remarkable collection. ''Bring on the damn swans,'' the book begins,as poem by poem it strips away ''art'' to uncover beauty, and we find the grounds for belief, for in Madonick''s hard reckoning we discover that, like the prey''s vulnerability to the predator, we are nonetheless ''as good as danger is.'' Through extraordinary range and mastery of diction and music, Madonick pits the confusions and destructions of the present, both natural and human, against the consolation and tested experience of lyric. And lyric wins—for BULRUSHES is poetry itself, that fragile ark of language in which hope is borne."—William Wenthe

2013 Nebraska Book Award  More poems based on the Jewish tradition by the great Brooklyn poet, Hal Sirowitz, author of Mother Says.

"What one finds in these poems is the truth. It''s as simple as that. No frills from the workshop, no ostentatious diction or imagery, but only the firm, quiet enterprise of authenticity. In a world increasingly crude, cruel, and repulsive what could be more pleasing, more useful? Not that these poems shun our actual history. Violence and dislocation are the clearly stated context here. But the accurate vision of a committed imagination prevails, and does so in language as flawless as language can be. I recommend these poems for their wisdom and insight, but even more for their steadfast initiative and independence, their refusal to be fashionable." --Judge''s Statement by Hayden Carruth for Blinding the Goldfinches, 2003 Backwaters Prizewinner.

DELIBERATIONS is a master statement by one of the definitive voices of the American Great Plains. Highly polished, deeply felt, these poems are the harvest of a life lived close to the marrow.

"One might be forgiven for thinking that the almost universally dark subject matter of these eloquent poems—rape and its aftermath, murder, aberrant psychology, divorce, suicide—might make for gloomy reading. Banish the thought! These poems perfectly encompass both the surrounding darkness and the inextinguishable candle that is lit against it. They are not about life so much as they are the stuff of life itself. Savor them and take heart."—Pinckney Benedict, author of Miracle Boy and Other Stories

2012 Nebraska Book Award Twyla M. Hansen and Linda M. Hasselstrom reflect the Great Plains’ influence in seasoned poems that celebrate cloud and water and earth and their love of all things farm and ranch, green and blooming, feathered and furred, wild and domesticated, warm and breathing.

Frederick Zydek''s "ancient inland sea" is both a prehistoric feature of the Great Plains and the collective unconscious itself. Like Cather, Zydek presents the violently beautiful natural phenomena of Nebraska as possessing the power and inscrutable will of pagan gods. He is equally at home describing the domestic pleasures of farm life or the headier experiences of Nebraska in its fiercest moods, moving easily from the cabin of a combine to the thigh bones of woolly mammoths to the green terror of summer storms. Zydek has become a bolder, more audacious poet in his seventies than ever. This is his most varied and compelling book.—Lance Wilcox, Editor, River Oak Review

NATURAL THEOLOGIES: ESSAYS ABOUT LITERATURE OF THE NEW MIDDLE WEST is the first critical study of contemporary Mid-Plains literature. Denise Low shows how the region''s writers inherit a Frontier legacy from Indigenous and American settler communities. Myths continue to provide framework for fiction writers and poets, as well as nature and the rich community life. Not all of the region is rural. Cities like Minneapolis, Omaha, and Kansas City, have presence in the literature—but in context of the great acreage around them. This innovative book defines the region''s character while, at the same time, illuminating a panoramic past. Indigenous peoples and their philosophies add to this unique look at the Mid-continent''s literary culture.

2012 Nebraska Book Award In this remarkable anthology of poems about Weldon Kees or inspired by Weldon Kees—each accompanied by a statement by the poet regarding Kees''s influence, magic, and power over the imagination of 20th Century American poetry—the editors Christopher Buckley and Christopher Howell have scored a major coup in American letters. Coupled with these poems are nearly 20 essays by some of the greatest lights of 20th Century American poetry, including Dana Gioia and Joseph Brodsky.

Brad Maxfield''s strikingly well-crafted poems are a troubled search for connection and significance in both the deteriorating and the beautiful configurations of the visible world. While many of the poems focus on the natural world, there is no romanticizing of Nature in the pastoral tradition, no reassuring or redemptive beauty intrinsic in the world''s raw images. Rather, the speaker in these poems strives for an accurate assessment of just how much meaning is available to the naked eye. The answers, if there are any, lie within the interplay of the poet''s jaded memories and his thwarted desires. --Brian Bedard, Editor, South Dakota Review

Plainspoken, unassuming, the poems in Charles Gillispie''s first collection record the pain of the everyday, and the beauty, the hope. Though the vision is often dark, the language here is so alive with metaphor that the reader walks away with a sense of life''s ultimate vitality-and possibility. Gillispie''s is a world in which "Jays bully the light," "the sky . . . is interviewed by clouds;" a world in which "the smallest word can open a window." The Way We Go On is a large-hearted, accomplished debut.—Boyer Rickel

2012 Nebraska Book Award When the salvage crew finally arrived, they found the dead man and a half-sunken sailboat overflowing with receipts, journals, letters, lists, school notes— a lifetime''s accumulation of paper. Later, the woman''s body would be found. Brent Spencer''s father died as mysteriously as he had lived. Armed only with the soggy scraps of his father''s life, Spencer began a two-thousand-mile search for the man he never really knew. RATTLESNAKE DADDY is about that journey— a powerful, heartfelt, and often funny meditation on the bonds that unite and the boundaries that divide all fathers and sons.

Marge Saiser''s poetry is wise and generous and altogether genuine. No poet in this country is better at writing about love and, in a sense, all of her poems are in some way about love—Ted Kooser

"The strength of Tim Hunt''s nature poems drew me into this book. His observation of light, rocks, a hawk and a field mouse in ''High Desert Summer,'' a California landscape, is so intense that he seems to long to become part of it. Then come the poems honoring and loving his family, whose history is made up of men and women ''getting by,'' ''learning to make do,'' acquiring ''that tricky pride of the poor—the failing that is success.'' Here is a poet standing on the threshold of existence, acutely aware of the humans, both living and dead, existing in the rooms behind him, but wanting, ''other times,'' the consolation of nature. His ambivalence is a strength and enrichment, not only for him, but for his fortunate readers"—Judith Hemschemeyer.

"These pre-c.c. posts stream to us from some point ''prior to predication.'' It''s a place Tyrone Williams has been exploring on our behalf for a good, long time, beamed up, as it were, from some Ohio of the spirit, sending his missives back to us here on planet Grammar, a place of our own constant care and making where ''meanwhile means dissent.'' These are poems that teach us how to read them, or rather, teach us the deep structures that we didn''t know we knew. Take, for just one instance, the perfectly rhymed, perfectly logical line, ''X nee YHWH.'' The here unaccented ''nee''-sayer marks the places the vowels should go, the Xed out spot the tongue should find in history, the unspeakable languages of our own territorial claims. That''s a lot of work for one line to do, but that''s in the nature of scripture. Tyrone Williams has been hard on the case on our behalf. We owe him at the least a collective thank-you post-it"—Aldon Lynn Nielsen.

"In A FAR ALLEGIANCE, Roy Scheele offers us poems with the tough elegance of bleached bones. These poems are characterized by taut lines, crisp diction, and electric imagery and a search within each poem for a perfect expressive formΓÇösometimes rhymed, sometimes stanzaic, sometimes blank verse, always with a compelling sense of closure in the way the last line seals the bond between form and meaning. Whether recalling childhood experience in Nebraska, ruminating on the nature of memory, or recalling a scene or work of art, these poems have the integrity of the well-wrought urn"—Les Whipp.

"It is refreshing these days of spreading capitalism and colorless urban life to read lines of poetry that insist on ''summer music'' of talking about trees, with attentiveness and affection. His feeling toward the natural world is genuine—but hardly naive. Looking at the branches he also looks ''in the dark, in mind.'' ''I notice the glow of the light-green,'' this poet says. There is a dash of Dylan Thomas in this lyric, and much of Strous''s own wisdom in lines such as ''Carpentry of these trees—/they are so simple.'' But readers will quickly realize that on the page such simplicity is only seeming. It looks simple because a great deal of work was put into the words"—Ilya Kaminsky.

Conjured from hen scratches and devil''s tales, from family stories and ancestral songs, Linnea Johnson''s poems migrate from a landscape of elegy to roost in the cliffs of lyric transformation. In musical lines that narrate both the natural history of birds and their folklore, as well as her family history of Swedish immigration to the Midwest, Johnson explores the darkness that leads to light. "''It is flesh which remembers, bones which are/remembered....'' Who would not believe her?"—Catherine Anderson

"How does Jean LeBlanc make her poems so comfortably alive? Her candor, yes. Images already there. Full of surprise, but amiably free of shock. She is one of us, being singular. Such a pleasure, then, to enter and re-enter her world, poem after poem, and to share in the canny play of her language, to follow the casual gambits of her agile mind as she turns the commonplace on its ear. On her ear. I laughed out loud. I''m so pleased. I ache with the unexpected familiarity of her feelings. Her fancies. I find I am thinking of her as Jeannie. Look out! Look out! It''s like falling in love again. I''m going to read AT ANY MOMENT, one poem a day, to my wife"—Edward Lueders.

"Matthew Brennan''s impressively wide-ranging new volume marks a major imaginative breakthrough for an already fine poet. Mixing personal memory and cultural history, Brennan''s poems incisively chronicle the joys, sorrows, and astonishments of a now vanished Twentieth Century America"&mdashDana Gioia.

"Bengtson''s poems are rough-edged and sassy. He pulls no punches. This trip down LEAVENWORTH STREET is not for the weak of heart or the shy of spirit. Be prepared for a few bruises. This is a bumpy ride that celebrates the indomitable spirit of a survivor who has learned his craft well and parades his words and life experience from one end of Leavenworth Street to the other. This is an exhilarating read"—Fredrick Zydek.

"The figurative subtlety and range of these poems made this book an imaginative feast. Throughout, I had a sense that I was being presented the story of a life by means of a deeper language, as if Jorn Ake has figured out how to speak directly through the feelings that attach to actions, objects and memories. With a work this metaphorical, I look at what recurs—the desert and childhood, photography and music, violence on a personal and political scale—and there is an ongoing, loving nod to the artists who have shaped this poet''s mind. I also sense that what drives his work is a desire to characterize the feeling of a time period, the later 20th century, with all its ''blindness/flying moth-crazy about the light.'' I cannot turn away from these poems. This is a fascinating book"—Bob Hickok.

Come along on a wild ride with this clear-eyed drunken rodeo clown cowboy who takes the bull by the horns and flips him so you see belly side up through a pickup window the country this holy fool''s vision as he rides with his front seat dog through this twisted country he loves to the meat locker of hell and epiphany. Great Plains reincarnation of the holy fool, J. V. Brummels, a Populist poet in the old sense, takes his readers like front-seat dogs on a wild ride across lonesome pastures, down prescient gravel roads, past knowing trees and greedy cornfields, through the twisted country he loves, till we arrive at the meat locker of hell and epiphany.