May 4, 2024 | Author Houses, Kansas, Kansas, Literary Landscapes, Nature, Poets, Volume 13
Ron Wilson Lazy T Ranch Manhattan, Kansas By Traci Brimhall 🎧 Listen at HPPR Gravel crunches beneath my tires as I approach Lazy T Ranch, home of the Kansas Poet Lariat Ron Wilson. It’s an unseasonably warm February day, and birds punctuate the silence with their...
May 2, 2023 | Illinois, Literary Landscapes, Nature, Poets, Volume 11
Lisel Mueller 27240 N. Longwood Dr. Forest Haven, Illinois By Jenny Mueller “Our trees are aspens, but people / mistake them for birches” — so begins Lisel Mueller’s “Another Version,” set in 1970s Midwestern suburbia. This proves to be a territory of error. After...
Dec 18, 2022 | Kansas, Literary Landscapes, Nature, Nonfiction, Novelists, Poets, Volume 10, Writers of Color
Gordon Parks Marmaton RiverFort Scott, Kansas By Jeromiah Taylor The grass is fuchsia, the sky bluntly cold, and the horizon swathed in haze. It is late November on the Osage Plains. In southeast Kansas, the distinction between grassland and woodland, or plain and...
Sep 7, 2022 | Author Houses, Literary Landscapes, Nature, Poets, Volume 9, Wisconsin
Lorine Niedecker River CabinBlackhawk Island, WI By Shanley Wells-Rau I was the solitary plovera pencil______for a wing-bone What more solitary place than a small off-grid cabin on an island that’s not really an island jutting into a lake that’s not really a lake. The...
May 25, 2022 | Literary Landscapes, Michigan, Nature, Poets, Volume 8
Philip Levine Belle IsleWaawiiyaatanong By Daniel A. Lockhart I’ve come to the river, as one does frequently in Waawiiyaatanong, in the closing weeks of winter. The land has begun to wake up from the snow and the river itself contains patchworks of ice, a south...
May 25, 2022 | Kansas, Literary Landscapes, Nature, Poets, Volume 8
James Tate Cow Creek CrossingPittsburg, Kansas By Leslie VonHolten Each James Tate poem presents itself like a welcoming trailhead — happy, sunshiney even. It is not until you are deep in the woods of it all before you sense the lurking weirdness. For example, in “The...
