Bøger udgivet af Backwaters Press

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.

"John Clarke writes beautifully about the natural world, about marshes, orchards, blackbirds, deer, a one-footed pheasant, or the arrival of ''first snow / tapping its small canes.'' His poems, like the country night sky to which he often calls our attention, glitter with fine detail, are compact and tightly tuned with a Zen-like clarity of line. GOOD LONELY DAY is essentially about watching that leads to seeing, about inner and outer weather. Clarke''s poems register both the small and immense changes that seasons, days, and hours bring; they are a source of beauty and wisdom that invite a reader to return"—Peter Makuck.

"Fueled with ecstatic rage and syncopated with jazzed-up pistons and B-bop timing belts, T. J. Anderson''s RIVER TO CROSS is a long ride and deep plunge into the American subconscious. Lyrical, linguistically inventive, and deadly serious, Anderson wields surrealism to create surprising metaphors and revelatory dream symbols for our age, for the struggles our spirits and bodies engage. Attuned to ''you who are off'' and taking the pulse of ''that red bud that brews/the blood in bloom,'' RIVER TO CROSS is a momentous achievement worthy of our attention and celebration"—Khaled Mattawa.

"In CLOSING DISTANCES, Paul Martin keeps alive for a little longer the people who lived in the working-class town where he grew up. Here are the old Slovak women,husbands, parents, and grandparents, brothers, the racy butcher. Here is the Slovak language that is slowly being forgotten. And here are beauty and sorrow, humor, tenderness and wisdom. In the aptly named ''The Fading Photograph,'' a poem about his paternal grandfather, we read, ''Proud old man, forgive me for thinking I understand.'' Thing is, Paul Martin does understand, and to read these wonderful, often heartbreaking poems is to share in that understanding and to be uplifted. We are much richer for these poems"—Harry Humes.

"These are brave and mature poems, facing divorce and aging even as they revel in the natural world, particularly that of the high desert. The book encompasses the sweep of personal and geographical time from the shift of tectonic plates to neolithic cave painters to the latest visit of a finch to a feeder. Imagination and verve are both praised and embodied in language that is by turns gorgeous and stark and always apt to the observation--whether it be of bees pollinating skunk cabbage or cranes descending to a marsh, to the seductiveness of succumbing to bipolar swings. In her ode to duende and other poems, Cowing asks the reader to ''consider that your life needs only longing/to be absorbed in something entire.'' This injunction is borne in her poetry, which is rooted in passion and blossoms in imagination"—Donald Levering.

Eighty of Thomas McGrath''s former students and friends offer a moving tribute in poetry and prose to one of the seminal poet-teachers of the 20th century.

Like the crows he describes in one of his witty, wry poems, John J. Ronan casts "a cold eye on life, on death." These edgy, intelligent poems brim with emotion without ever nearing the sentimental. Ronan revels in life and laments inevitable time, but does not wallow. An Irish American steeped in dark joy, Ronan reveals roots in Yeats, Heaney, Mahon and others. "To exist and then not to exist—it''s a raw sort of humor," he writes. In his work we see both the raw surface and always, always the humor. These poems are a joy to read.

In Branch in His Hand, a boy falls to his death and a mother sings a requiem in poems. The reader will not ever forget the Italy that he loved, or the wall from which he fell. Charde takes us to Italy, to the wall: A fissure in the wall like / a wound . . . and to the sea, in search of healing. In these brutally honest, beautiful poems, we face the death of one who is dearly loved, and recognize, as the poet says, that grief is at least part of what you / will grow into.—Pat Schneider, author, Writing Alone and With Others, Oxford University Press, and founder, Amherst Writers & Artists.

"Through the dark of childhood and the illness of aging parents, through the mystery of insects and roses and gulls, in places both ordinary and odd, this poet enters beauty-its pain and release-with equal fearlessness."—Marianne Boruch