Poetry
Harvest Widows
"Unflinching, attentive, both reverential and honest, the poems in Nick Bertelson's Harvest Widows address what it is to be midwestern."--James McKean, author of Headlong, Tree of Heaven, and We Are the Bus
Nick Bertelson is a fourth-generation farmer from southwestern Iowa. His poetry has appeared in Coe Review, Valley Voices, Prairie Fire, and North American Review, as a James Hearst Poetry Prize finalist.
Harvest Widows is the second chapbook to be published as NDSU Press’s annual Poetry of the Plains and Prairies Award, and the fourth chapbook to be produced by publishing students on turn-of-the-twentieth-century hand-letterpress equipment.
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.
Hunter's Log: Volumes II & III
In Hunter’s Log: Volumes II & III, you’ll find Tim’s love for all the rites and tribulations of rising at O Dark Thirty, God O'clock to take his dogs out for training or hunting and for days that conclude with a pheasant gumbo steaming on the stove.
“Murphy is not just our best hunting poet . . . he is also our bard of all things North, with the blood of the Irish and Vikings in his veins. . . . No one can write better about the chill that always lurks in the northern breeze even on summer evenings, or the knowledge of mortality seasoned in the present even in the best of days. These volumes are full of the rueful mortal comedy of a man who has seen friends and dogs die and knows he is not immune.” Timothy Murphy’s “hunting, as it should, has given him the eye of a painter and a botanist’s knowledge welded seamlessly together by the ear of a poet.” —Stephen Bodio, book editor for
Gray’s Sporting Journal, author of eleven books, including A Rage for Falcons: An Alliance between Man and Bird
“Murphy, a poet, was perhaps the best known literary figure living in North Dakota.”
—Mike Jacobs, former editor and publisher of Grand Forks Herald
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
In Plains Sight
In a rich yet often austere setting of the Great Plains, Bonnie Larson Staiger's second poetry collection--In Plains Sight--brings those realities into full view through the lens of the prairie ethos. In moments when the natural world confounds the objective and logical world, she brings us into an encounter with a coyote, a sub-zero walk after a blizzard, or a humorous swipe at a fast-food restaurant. Paperback with French flaps.
Last Buffalo, The
Contemporary poetry from the farms and ranches of the Dakotas. Striking insights into 21st Century rural life.
By: Bruce Roseland.