NOW AVAILABLE:
Learning to Drive Nails The third collection of poetry by Dwaine Spieker Get your copy here! RFP invites you to purchase your copy of Nebraska Book Award-winner Dwaine Spieker's newest collection of poetry! Learning begins where Spieker's second collection Magellan ends, with Spieker once again employing well-crafted lines, careful stanzas, and intense imagery to explore his themes. Among other topics, Learning to Drive Nails includes emotional meditations on love and loss, masculine identity, and that strange midground referred to as middle age, as seen in poems like "Welder": Welder He set his clamps, checked his ground. Then, lowering his helmet, he closed his arc, himself the bead between worlds. Here is what critics are saying about Learning to Drive Nails: In Learning to Drive Nails, Dwaine Spieker offers some wonderful images celebrating the various stages of life . . . from a painful beginning in the title poem, “Learning to Drive Nails,” to the “Footing. Poise. Balance” in the poem “Pitchfork,” Spieker recalls the process of learning “…how good work felt, how cleaning up / and clearing out approached perfection, / how fork by fork I could heft tons.” Neil Harrison Author of Back In The Animal Kingdom Order your copy today! |
NOW AVAILABLE!
HOMING: The Collected Works of Don Welch Get your copy here! Beloved Nebraska Poet Don Welch's collected works is finally available to lovers of great poetry! Selected by award winning editor Dwaine Spieker and Don himself, this stunning collection of poems spans over forty years of Welch's award-winning verse. Here are what critics say about Don Welch's HOMING: “W. H. Auden once wrote ‘A poet’s hope: to be/like some valley cheese, /local, but prized everywhere.’ This is about as precise a statement as one could ever make of Don Welch, the senior poet of Nebraska and of the Great Plains. Yet Don has always been a modest man, content to immerse himself in his first affections: family, homing pigeons, the Platte River and the birds that brand the flight path so uniquely, and writing an enduring poetry that never pretends to be anything but well-made. Those of us who have read his work faithfully for forty years recognize the magnitude of his contribution to the local, but we are also painfully aware his contribution to American letters should be celebrated in great measure. Don never sought a national audience. Rather, like the faith he has in his homing pigeons, he sent his poems to the world, hoping they (and not himself) would be prized and return to readers the spirit of the local that suffices above all." —Mark E Sanders, publisher of Sandhills Press, author of “Conditions of Grace: New and Selected Poems” “Don Welch’s ever-present theme—you are not listening for it, yet it finds you—is courage, specifically moral courage. And how difficult that is to sustain. Still, this is the music we have always needed and need even more, right now. As Welch attaches his broad vision to land and sky, birds and animals, he simultaneously tells us all about the solitary, bursting, and contradictory human heart. Born out of a deep and complex love, his inherited strength is transferred. Like the best of our American tradition, these are spirituals. Welch’s beautiful and valiant poems touch needful readers on the shoulder, show us it will be okay, and, somehow, it is." —Steve Langan, founder of The Seven Doctors Project, author of “What It Looks Like, How It Flies” Pick up your copy of HOMING here today! |