North Dakota
Greetings from North Dakota
From the postcard collections of Lawrence Aasen and Ronald Olin; historical information written by John Bye and John Hallberg--An address book that features historic North Dakota postcards and short historical notes regarding the towns that they represent. Greetings from North Dakota was compiled by the professionals of the Institute from the postcard collections of Lawrence Aasen and Ronald Olin. They are uniquely North Dakota.
Half the Terrible Things
Half the Terrible Things is an intimate and sometimes violent novel portraying three interconnected lives. Based on true events, the life of Martin Tabert is short and tragic. Tabert is a young farm boy from Munich, North Dakota. While traveling around the country in 1922, he is pulled off a train near Tallahassee, Florida, charged with vagrancy, sentenced to a convict work camp, and whipped to death by the camp “Whipping Boss.” His body is buried in an unknown location in wild swamp country. Eighty years later, his girlfriend, Edna, nearing her end in a nursing home in Devils Lake, ND, asks her granddaughter, Nicole, to find his grave. Nicole, a young attorney with the U.S. Justice Department in Washington, D.C., searches the Florida swamps while struggling with her own guilt stemming from her work at the Justice Department post 9/11. The Tabert case resulted in prison reform in Florida after North Dakotans intervened following Tabert’s death.
Gratitude with Dogs under Stars
Gratitude with Dogs under Starsfeatures selections from Debra Marquart’s three collections of lyric poetry (Small Buried Things, New Rivers Press 2015; From Sweetness, Pearl Editions 2001; and Everything’s a Verb, New Rivers Press 1995) and adds twenty-one new poems to round out the experience. Beginning with the new poems, the collection travels back through Marquart’s illustrious career. Long-time fans and newcomers alike can track the trajectory of this poet laureate’s poetic life thus far—the quiet serenity of walking dogs under a starry sky, the horrors of fracking, the beginnings of a tender relationship at a firing range, reflecting on the follies of a youthful life lived carefree.
Debra Marquart is Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts & Sciences and teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State University, as well as the Stonecoast Low-Residency MFA Program at University of Southern Maine. Marquart serves as Iowa’s Poet Laureate and the Senior Editor of Flyway: Journal of Writing & Environment. The author of seven books—including the memoirs The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere (Counterpoint 2007) and The Night We Landed on the Moon (North Dakota State University Press 2021)—Marquart has been featured on NPR and the BBC and has received over 50 grants and awards including an NEA Fellowship, a PEN USA Award, a New York Times Editors’ Choice commendation, and Elle Magazine’s Elle Lettres Award. In 2021, Marquart was awarded a Poets Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. For more information: debramarquart.com
Paperback, 278 pp
BISAC:
- POE024000 Poetry / Women Authors
- POE023040 Poetry / Subjects & Themes / Places
- POE023050 Poetry / Subjects & Themes / Family
- POE005010 Poetry / American / General
Hiking All Night
At a relentless pace, Timothy Iver Murphy (1951–2018) produced an incredible amount of poetry in the last years of his life. A sample of his brilliant work is included in this posthumously published collection.
Hiking All Night is an account of the simple pleasures of Murphy’s life: hunting, companionship of faithful dogs, farming, and hiking — a lifelong habit carried over from his training as an Eagle Scout and member of the Order of the Arrow. Murphy extends his reach beyond his native region of the northern plains, across the United States and as far as the Himalayan Mountains. Throughout Hiking All Night, familiar inspirations appear, including homage to the masters of literature who have formed his craft and the religious beliefs that anchored his life. Most poignantly, Murphy includes relationships with friends and family, the physical and emotional struggles of this mortal world, and reflections upon regrets and restoration.
hardcover/373 pages/3 color inserts
Preface by former Colorado Poet Laureate David Mason
Hiking All Night is Timothy Murphy's penultimate collection of poetry. Forthcoming in summer 2021, NDSU Press will publish Last Poems, written by Murphy during the final months of his life.
His Feathers Were Chains
Lajimodiere’s newest collection of poetry takes its title from a statue the author observed--an Indian on a horse--fashioned from welded-together farm implements. The premise of the collection is overt criticism of settler society, but the poetry is subtle, approachable, and grounded in Ojibwe knowledge and customs. Feathers is divided into five sections: Broken Glass Dreams, Identity, His Feathers Were Chains, Thin White Heat, and Dancing with a Whirlwind.
Home River
Although Home River is a work of fiction, readers should not underestimate the great amount of historicity therein. Rodney Nelson has captured in carefully honed language the distinctive lilt of Norwegian-American dialect and the political and social atmosphere of the Red River Valley of the North in the middle 1940s. By imagining one small episode from that era, he achieves an authenticity of voice and color which might not have been possible in a strict recounting or memoir. Rodney Nelson has studied the valley for most of his life; his novels, stories and books of poems reflect his clear-eyed, unsentimental love for this rich land and difficult climate, and for the equally complex people who chose to settle the area, his grandparents among them. Home River is first of all a work of fiction whose intent is simply to please-but one of the many other things the book does is to help us preserve our knowledge of the immigrant pioneering spirit as manifested in the settlers of the Red River Valley and their children.