Description
Book SynopsisFrom Richmond. Virginia, to Madison, Wisconsin, to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, this new collection by Robert Alexander spans both physical and emotional distances. Comprising prose poems and flash fiction written over the course of a 45-year career, Finding Token Creek reveals an imaginative and deeply felt connection both with other human beings and with the natural world. Jim Harrison called Alexander’s work “lucid and lovely.”
Trade Review“This beautiful collection of new and selected writings from Robert Alexander’s rich career as poet, editor, scholar and critic, covers a lot of territory. And that territory is better understood as something more deep than wide, something as much below the surface as above, whether the setting is a lake in Wisconsin or a hotel room in Richmond. A master of the prose poem, that hybrid form born at the crossroads of story and poem, a place where sacred meets profane, Alexander is a lover of the natural world and the human condition, the poems as full of yearning, puzzled people as they are of birds in flight, watching the author with the same intensity that he watches them from his canoe drifting close to shore. There is an uncanny stillness, a hush at the heart of the poems that is nearly palpable. “Here, at last, is a world you can learn to call your own” (“Now the Lake Is Empty”).” —Holly Iglesias, author of Boxing Inside the Box: Women’s Prose Poetry “In this rich retrospective of subtly artful and distinctively American prose poems, Robert Alexander discovers sufficiency and even the marvelous in the given, presented to us with affection and clarity. In several of the compressed narratives in which he appears as his Thoreauvian alter ego Ralph, the rugged landscape of Upper Peninsula Michigan itself becomes a beloved central character. Alexander understands, just as Martin Buber said, that all true living is encounter. In these poems encounters abound, not only with the human and nonhuman but in one eerily timely poem a monument to "Calhoun the Nullifier" in the South. In its humane sympathies and breadth, Finding Token Creek beckons the reader with its promise, "Here, at last, is a world you can learn to call your own.”" —Thomas R. Smith, author of Windy Day at Kabekona: New and Selected Prose Poems
Table of ContentsCONTENTS Introduction: Prose/Poetry Richmond Burning Clouds of Swallows Maggie May Late One Night Frog-pond in April Afternoon Richmond Burning This Year Ralph Sees What We Can Learn from Other Primates Muskrat After the Reading The Clouds Pregnant with Rain Two about Dogs Pedestal Ralph Rises Early Archive Like Our Shadow-Selves September Whatever Dance Crows Turtle in the Afternoon A Black Spruce Meditation A Puffball Nearly Spherical from What the Raven Said Ralph in His Canoe Ralph Goes to the Birds I n a Month This Will All Be The Naming of Muskrat Point Every Day Ralph The Night the Honey Locusts Bloom Vacation Notes Ralph Attends the Turtle Convention Lake Solstice Eagle and Otter at Midsummer In the Sportsman Ralph Among the Lily Pads What I Wanted to Tell You On the Last Day of Summer Only in Retrospect Ralph Wakes One Morning Old Possum Mosquito Bay Ralph Wakes One Morning What the Raven Said Paddler’s Technique Now the Lake is Empty from White Pine Sucker River Where Ralph Lived At the Party From Where He Sat White Pine Sucker River Weekend Mickey Library Was It Louis Aragon A Joe Pass Guitar Solo One of the Guys Every Night He’d See Her Finding Token Creek My Father Had a Small Lab For Years My Father At Night the Street Rain Ralph Finds a New Park Corn Supermarkets Vacation Garage Snow at Ten O’clock from Five Forks: Waterloo of the Confederacy Calhoun’s Monument postscript: Ralph & the Rabbit
