American Saunter

<p><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>A soaring and vivid travelogue of dusty dog-eared stories people and places exploring the long wide highway stretch of the American landscape and imagination.</span><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(36 36 36 1)> </span><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>With great formal range poems sing to American heroines like Rachel Carson Julia Butterfly Hill Zora Neale Hurston and Loretta Lynn in between readers standing in places of nuanced and emotional power such as Memphis' Civil Rights Museum Gettysburg Salem Pride Parade Vietnam Memorial and Laura Ingalls Wilder's home. From wrestling with the epidemics of mass shootings and violence against women to racism and genocide this collection does not tiptoe around the contradictions strife and injustice within the country. Yet somehow together the poems manage to breathe a small mighty flame of genuine hope keeping it alight - an astute look into America's natural beauty spiritual diversity and steadfast ability to rise from the ashes. </span><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(36 36 36 1)>From the</span><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> Grand Canyon's hot red clay bottom of the rushing Colorado River to the pure pinpoint moments of an ending relationship at a midwestern train station the collection's multi-faceted lenses of distinctly U.S. history ecology religions spirituality cultures and the natural world will leave you feeling as if you licked the sweet and prickly layers of a pineapple.  </span></p><p></p>