Products tagged with 'poetry'

The scope of the poets in this collection is as broad as the landscape itself, including work by Heid E. Erdrich, Mark Vinz, Debra Marquart, Ed Bok Lee, and North Dakota’s Poet Laureate,Larry Woiwode.

Some are poets descended from indigenous inhabitants of the High Plains. Others are descendants of those who immigrated here,from Germany, Russia, or the Scandinavian countries in the nineteenth century, or more recently from other parts of the country and world. They write about the historical struggles of settlement and assimilation, and more contemporary versions of those struggles in the Bakken oil patch in the western part of the state. Some write about North Dakota from the rural settings they have known and loved for a lifetime, others from the distant vantages of nostalgia or escape, and still others from the point of view of transplants coming to terms with their new home. The poets here include seasoned and emerging voices, women and men, old and young, those from the ranching and oil-flared badlands west of the Missouri, and from the flood-prone river valley farmlands of the east.

The poems in this book ache for home. They ache to be at home. In reflecting those who ache in this great expanse, these poems are about what connects us together as humans, poems that sing to each other across lines and pages and space, demonstrating that, as poet Thomas McGrath asserts in his Letter to an Imaginary Friend,North Dakota is everywhere.

Edited by Heidi Czerwiec
Copyright 2015
180 pages
Softcover

About a year ago, Katherine Hoerth moved to Nebraska from Texas; her poems chronicle the experience of adjusting to life on the Great Plains amid the isolation and uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic. The term "prairie madness" feels, Hoerth observes, particularly fitting as it was once used to describe the "madness" of women pioneers of Nebraska and Kansas who endured extreme isolation.

Hoerth is an assistant professor of English at Lamar University and editor of Lamar University Literary Press. Her work has been published in journals such as The Georgia Review and Valparaiso Review. She is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, and in 2015 she won the Helen C. Smith Prize for the best book of poetry in Texas.

Prairie Madness is the sixth volume of our Poetry of the Plains & Prairies letterpress chapbook series. Each copy is unique, with hand-assembled pressed flowers.

A collection of poems that continue the ideas first introduced by South Dakotan Bruce Roseland in The Last Buffalo. Bruce's poems are about surviving the (simple) country life in South Dakota.

By: Bruce Roseland.
Illustrated by: Marie Louise Tesch
ISBN 978-0-911042-70-2
Copyright 2008
Softcover 84 pages

Camrud channels the storytelling spirit & tradition of valiant narratives, melding tones of landscapes, women, and men into a familial literary score that maps emotions on the expansive Dakota prairie. Labeled a book of songs, this poetry collection is a hymn to the adventurous European women who transplanted on the northern plains in the aftershocks of ocean and continent crossings and to their hyphenated-American daughters and daughters’ daughters born in successive generations.

An icon of literary culture on the northern plains, Mark Vinz observes the details—be they dreary or delightful—of real life. Through concise language and powerful imagery, he conveys his memories, marked more by the present than the past, with clarity and affection.

Paperback w/French flaps
192 pp
Available now for presales. We will ship out the first week of September

In April 1909, twenty-two-year-old Robert Silliman Judd, born and raised in Bethel, Connecticut, climbed aboard a train bound for the northern plains where his uncle Elmer farmed in Cando, North Dakota. Robert roamed the prairie with Elmer for six months, observing and collecting birds during the great spring migration.

Decades later, Robert’s granddaughter Margaret Rogal discovered his notebooks filled with detailed records of birds, nests, and eggs, along with his letters and summaries portraying his love for North Dakota and the thousands of migrating birds, alighting, it seemed, at his very feet.

Margaret responded to the trove of documents with poetry; each sample herein is an exploration of Robert’s experience.

A Little Book about North Dakota, Volume 1
6"x 6", paperback, 120 pages, color illustrations throughout