Rare Earth

Bradford Tice: Bradford Tice is a poet and fiction writer who currently teaches at Nebraska Wesleyan University. His work has appeared in such periodicals as The Atlantic Monthly, North American Review, The American Scholar, Alaska Quarterly Review, Mississippi Review, Crab Orchard Review, as well as in Best American Short Stories 2008. He is also the winner of Prairie Schooner’s 2009 Edward Stanley Award for poetry and New Rivers Press' Many Voices Project prize for poetry.

The author's academic degrees (PhD English with creative dissertation) and honors (University of Tennessee Citation for Extraordinary Professional Promise) indicate that Tice has the credentials for creating this title. He also has the personal experience:

Tice wrote the poems in this collection as a young adult in a time when he was beginning to navigate his life as a gay man, what that meant and how it would shape his life, while also looking back on his childhood. There is a very real cathartic gesture in many of these poems. Tice observes that it is impossible to grow up as a gay youth in America today, especially in the Bible Belt, the Heartland, and not have a bit of poison in your system. These poems are meant to capture and articulate a certain adolescent desire to grow out of (or past) certain experiences in his life, as well as show how those experiences have cast the person that he is today. Rare Earth reveals a person (a family) in crisis, a person grappling with faith, identity, sexuality, mortality, self-worth. Tice's first book exorcises the traumas of growing up gay and having to come out in the backdrop of the Bible Belt and the American South, grappling with how the family can both heal and harm, sometime even in the same gesture.