New Poets of the American West [Paperback]

Lowell Jaeger (Author, Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1, 2010

Collected here are poems about horse racing, mining, trash collecting, nuclear testing, firefighting, border crossings, buffalo hunting, surfing, logging, and sifting flour. In these pages you will visit flea markets, military bases, internment camps, reservations, funerals, weddings, rodeos, nursing homes, national parks, backyard barbecues, prisons, forests, meadows, rivers, and mountain tops. In your mind s eye, you will meet a simple-minded girl who gets run over by a bull, two mothers watching a bear menacingly nosing toward unsuspecting children, and children who have yet to be toilet trained out of their souls. You will learn to reach into the sacred womb, / grasp a placid hoof / and coax life toward this certain moment. You ll teach poetry to third graders, converse with hitchhikers, lament for an incarcerated brother trying to fill the holes in his soul / with Camel cigarettes / and crude tattoos. You will sit at the kitchen table where perhaps the world will end while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite. In the short time each of us has in this world, here s your chance to experience life widely and to reflect on your experiences deeply. Lowell Jaeger, Editor

Editorial Reviews

Review

In New Poets of the American West, we hear from Native Americans and first-generation immigrants, from ranchlanders and megaopolites, from poet-teachers and street-poets, and more. In fact, the West is so big, and home to such diversity that the deeper one reads in this anthology, the more voices and world views one encounters, the more textures of thought, emotion, and language one discovers, the less we may find ourselves able to speak of a single, stable something called the American West. Rather, we may find ourselves living in (or reading into) not one West, but many. --Brady Harrison, Professor, University of Montana

Product Details

• Paperback: 550 pages
• Publisher: Many Voices Press; First edition (August 1, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0979518547
• ISBN-13: 978-0979518546
• Product Dimensions: 9.9 x 7 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #844,870 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great poems from and for everyday people!, September 24, 2010

By 

Denise "AintNoNinny" (CA USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: New Poets of the American West (Paperback)

I saw this book in an independent Santa Fe bookstore last week (for full retail price + tax)and I stood there for more than 30 minutes reading through it. I knew I needed to buy it and almost purchased it then and there. My common sense won out, though, and I waited to get home to buy it from Amazon. I can't wait to receive it. As a poet of common themes myself, I appreciate such poetry from others.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Perfect Book for Poetry Skeptics, August 14, 2010

By 

H. Bissell "~Mariquita~" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: New Poets of the American West (Paperback)

I admit I started off as a poetry skeptic myself a few years ago. That is, until I got in to college and joined a poetry workshop full of real people who wrote about real things. I suddenly discovered I could understand and love poetry as much as I loved fiction.

Mr. Jaeger says it best in his introduction to the Anthology: "Over nearly three decades, I've taught poetry courses and workshops to audiences of all descriptions, beginners especially, and I know with certainty that people who claim they can't understand poetry, can indeed. It's a matter of exposure..." (3).

This is a book full of understandable poems from understandable people who work and live everyday lives, and have chosen to tell us about them. But what is everyday for one person is a new and interesting experience for another. That is what makes poetry beautiful, and that is what makes this book unique as it shows us the lives of people in eleven different states, with numerous backgrounds, cultures and traditions. Come and meet them.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Mixed Blessing...Like Seeing Your Favorite Aunt Naked, November 29, 2010

By 

J. Alfier (Germany) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: New Poets of the American West (Paperback)

Before I write this review - really a broad summation, let me state that my opinion just underscores what I as poet and poetry reader like; there's no objective standard or law I'm laying down here. So...I was delighted when some benevolent poet sent me `New Poets of the American West.' I was introduced to many outstanding poets and their works, some of them totally new to me, and I ended up ordering several of their books. My favorite poems here were written by Allen Braden, William Pitt Root, Pam Uschuk, Jim Harrison, Sean Nevin, Dick Bakken, Jim Barnes, John Dofflemeyer, Clarence Major, Michael McGriff, Peter Anderson, Dan Beachy-Quick, Reg Saner, Rawdon Tomlinson, Heather Cahoon, Shaun T. Griffin, Adrian C. Louis, Gailmarie Pahmeir, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Marianne A. Broyles, David Axelrod, Beth Lynch Husted, Harold Johnson, Carlos Reyes, Vern Rutsala, Primus St. John, Kim Stafford, Katherine Coles, Elizabeth Bradfield, Sherman Alexie, Mark Halperin, Marjorie Manwaring, Duane Niatum, David Wagoner, H.L. Hix, Bo Moore, and Kate Northrup.

There are many outstanding poems in this compilation, though to get to them you have to wade through a lot of mediocre writing -- verse as homely and ordinary as shampoo commercials. An alarm went off for me when I came to poems written with lines of say, 15+ syllables, and the poem extended over a page. Gabby inventories and manifestos don't make good poems, and neither do ditties and jungles that lack a sense of music, risk, tension, and negative capability - in short, verbal overloads of upper-and upper middle class domesticity that could serve as the poetic adjunct to Christian Lander's book, `Stuff White People Like.' Having said that, many poems would have been better off if they were reformatted into short stories, or flash fiction; that is, they are good writing, but for me, they fail as verse. Again, I'm just one guy, a schmoe in the world, and what I say here are my own thoughts, not some spiteful or stuffy `new critical' nor `high Modernist' pretension to objectivity. I highly recommend this compilation, and it is well worth the $24.00 price tag to be on your bookshelf. Mr. Jaeger has selected some of the best poets in America.

New Poets of the American West