Backwaters Press

"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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

"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,...

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...

"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,...

"In COME NOW, Rodger Gerberding reminds us of just how necessary the modernist's dogged desire to employ everything in the world: philosophies, myths, ideologies, art, snippets of conversation,...

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.Author:...

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...

An moving tribute in poetry and some prose to one of the seminal poet-teachers of 20th Century American poetry by eighty former students and friends.Author: John BradleyPublisher: Backwaters...

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...

"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...

"Culture's cloud chamber and its millions of random vectors drive Aaron Anstett's INSOFAR AS HERETOFORE. 'Whatever scintillants' he calls them in 'One Theory, ' an exclamation that's half-prayer and...

"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...

"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...

With wit and vulnerability, Brandel France de Bravo explores resilience in the face of climate change and a global pandemic, race, and the concept of a self, all while celebrating the power of breath...

"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...

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...

"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,...

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...

"amazing poems of sheer, narrative abundance" / Naomi Shihab NyeAuthor: Greg KuzmaPublisher: Backwaters PressPublication Date: May 31, 2015Number of Pages: 136 pagesBinding: Paperback or...

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...

"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...

"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,...

2013 Nebraska Book Award More poems based on the Jewish tradition by the great Brooklyn poet, Hal Sirowitz, author of Mother Says.Author: Hal SirowitzPublisher: Backwaters PressPublication Date: Sep...

"With unflinching stanzas threaded through with grief's relentless lyric, The Daughter's Almanac is a masterwork, a deftly crafted illustration of the myriad ways beauty collides with pain. Succinct...

"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...

"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...