Nebraska

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Nebraska

Poems

Kwame Dawes

120 pages

Paperback

October 2019

978-1-4962-2123-0

$19.95 Add to Cart
eBook (PDF)
Ebook purchases delivered via Leaf e-Reader

October 2019

978-1-4962-2146-9

$19.95 Add to Cart
eBook (EPUB)
Ebook purchases delivered via Leaf e-Reader

October 2019

978-1-4962-2144-5

$19.95 Add to Cart

About the Book

Kwame Dawes is not a native Nebraskan. Born in Ghana, he later moved to Jamaica, where he spent most of his childhood and early adulthood. In 1992 he relocated to the United States and eventually found himself an American living in Lincoln, Nebraska.

In Nebraska, this beautiful and evocative collection of poems, Dawes explores a theme constant in his work—the intersection of memory, home, and artistic invention. The poems, set against the backdrop of Nebraska’s discrete cycle of seasons, are meditative even as they search for a sense of place in a new landscape. While he shovels snow or walks in the bitter cold to his car, he is engulfed with memories of Kingston, yet when he travels, he finds himself longing for the open space of the plains and the first snowfall.

With a strong sense of place and haunting memories, Dawes grapples with life in Nebraska as a transplant.

Author Bio

Kwame Dawes is Chancellor’s Professor of English and Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He is the author of twenty-one books of poetry and author or editor of numerous other books of fiction, criticism, and essays. Dawes’s most recent books include the poetry collections City of Bones: A Testament and Punto de Burro and the novel Bivouac. He is director of the African Poetry Book Fund, editor of the award-winning African Poetry Book Series, and artistic director of the Calabash International Literary Festival. The winner of numerous awards for his writing and service to the literary community, Dawes was elected a chancellor for the Academy of American Poets, named a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018, and won the prestigious Windham Campbell Award for Poetry in 2019.

 
 
 

Praise

"Dawes is no longer a stranger to the middle American landscape, now a welcome newcomer creating space for new voices to be heard."—Luke Hollis, Harvard Review Online

"As the poet contemplates the wealth of opportunity that seems innate—now, as well as when the plains people first saw the land, concluding in Prairie that the wide-ranging opportunity must be home to imagination and continual new beginnings. This is where Nebraska meets the poet most intimately, as a place of riches and with a history of new beginnings."—Jordan Charlton, Adriot Journal

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments    

I
How I Became an Apostle    
Advent    
The Barking Geese of Edenton    
The Immigrant Contemplates Death    
Fledge        
Longing for the Hall of the Deaf    
The Midwestern Sky    
First Winter    
Loneliness    
Dark Season    
Plain-Speaking    
Novela        
The Scent of the Cankerworm    
Dawn        
Chadron    
Sandoz Revisited    
The Enemy of Memory    
The Poor Man’s Sacrifice    
Bones        
Sponge    
On History    
II
The Epoch of Lies    
Sea and Rain    
Purple        
Forgetting    
The Quality of Light    
In These Times    
Sugar        
“All Teeth and Smile”    
Sniper        
III
Half        
Long Distance    
Prairie        
Pleasure    
The Chronicler of Sorrows    
July Fourth    
IV
Jasmine    
On Blindness    
Insomniac    
Bed Time    
Transplant    
Surviving, Again    
Sancho Panza    
The Messiness of Place    
Bone Dust    
Ambulation    
Falling Away    
On Picking Battles    
The Exile Remembers His Sisters    
Fatigue    

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