In the continental United States, rivers serve to connect state to state, interior with exterior, the past to the present, but they also divide places and peoples from one another. These connections a
William Henry Harrison Clayton was one of nearly 75,000 soldiers from Iowa to join the Union ranks during the Civil War. Possessing a high school education and superior penmanship, Clayton served as a
2006 Iowa Poetry Prize winner“If everyone decided to call themselves a girl / that word would stop.” In this award-winning volume of authoritative and assertive poems, Sarah Vap embarks on an emotiona
Containing more than a hundred poems by seventy-four poets of twenty-two nationalities, Say This of Horses represents the abundance of poems about horses that have been written throughout the ages and
By reconsidering Whitman not as the proletarian voice of American diversity but as a historically specific poet with roots in the antebellum lower middle class, Andrew Lawson in Walt Whitman and the C
From 1896 to 1935, the flamboyant and controversial Billy Sunday preached his version of the gospel to millions of people across the nation. In this nontraditional biography of the man regarded by his
As more and more fans rush online to share their thoughts on their favorite shows or video games, they might feel like the process of providing feedback is empowering. However, as fan studies scholar
The Promise of Failure is part memoir of the writing life, part advice book, and part craft book; sometimes funny, sometimes wrenching, but always honest. McNally uses his own life as a blueprint for
In A Wrestling Life 2, famed wrestler and wrestling coach Dan Gable shares even more gripping stories of his life. Readers will learn about the start of his wrestling career in Waterloo, important con
In 2010, while editing a report on the effects of climate change in Iowa, ecologist Cornelia Mutel came to grips with the magnitude and urgency of the problem. She already knew the basics: greenhouse
“I guess an iceflow came through / to take the road,” writes Aaron McCollough inRank, a richly strange sequence of poems in which forces of nature, mind, spirit, and language partake of each other in
We’ve been together in sickness and in health, through the death of his mother, through the adoption of our children, through four long years of this legal battle,” Jason Morgan told reporters of hims
Long before he was a celebrated poet, Walt Whitman was a working journalist. By the time he published the first edition ofLeaves of Grass in 1855, Whitman had edited three newspapers and published tho
Luther Mathias sells ?snake oil” in scrubby West Texas dirt towns. He learns that substance is never a substitute for style and eventually develops his own remedies that promise to cure any ailment a
Every year in early August, a breeze borne by silent messengers from another time blows through Iowa. It carries a whiff of something wonderful, something far off and a bit unclear, yet oddly familiar
How far are we from the Lake District? How far from the garden? Eric Linsker’s first book scrolls down the Anthropocene, tracking our passage through a technophilic pastoral where work and play are bo
Over the past thirty years, narrative poems have made a comeback against the lyric approach to poetry that has dominated the past century. Drawing on a decade of conferences and critical seminars on t
?Metawriting—the writing about writing or writing that calls attention to itself as writing—has been around since Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy, but Jill Talbot makes that case that now more than ev
?Peter Selgin was cursed/blessed with an unusual childhood. The son of Italian immigrants—his father an electronics inventor and a mother so good looking UPS drivers swerved off their routes to see he
?Real musicians don’t sign autographs, date models, or fly in private jets. They spend their lives in practice rooms and basement clubs or toiling in the obscurity of coffee-shop gigs, casino jobs, an
The vast, unsettling landscape of the American Southwest is as much a character in Ryan Harty's debut collection, Bring Me Your Saddest Arizona, as the men and women who inhabit its award-winning stor
Lake Okoboji in northwest Iowa is the jewel of the Iowa Great Lakes. A region of wetlands formed by prairie potholes, the area is rich with lakes, sloughs, fens, creeks, prairies, and kettleholes. I
Kendra Allen’s first collection of essays—at its core—is a bunch of mad stories about things she never learned to let go of. Unifying personal narrative and cultural commentary, this
“At the edge of a field a thought waits,” writes Cassie Donish, in her collection that explores the conflicting diplomacies of body and thought while stranding us in a field, in a hospital
Writer and photographer Gary Lantz has always felt most at home in what the Osage used to call the “heart stays” country—the southern edge of the Flint Hills tallgrass prairie in Oklahoma’s Osage Coun
Unable to skate and surrounded by sports fans who cared more about Evel Knievel than hockey, Kevin Cunningham became obsessed with the Chicago Blackhawks as a confused eight year old. He has no idea w
A monumental transfer of farmland is occurring in the United States. The average American farmer is fifty-eight years old, and the 40 percent of farmland owners who lease their land to others are even
Simmons presents readers with a true story of one woman’s struggle with a bigamist husband in the 1950s. Through the use of an archive of roughly eight hundred of Eva Eldridge’s letters and personal p
He called the first atomic bomb “technically sweet,” yet as he watched its brilliant light explode over the New Mexico desert in 1945 in advance of the black horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he also
For ten months of the year, the prairie-chicken’s drab colors allow it to disappear into the landscape. However, in April and May this grouse is one of the most outrageously flamboyant birds in North
Cora Keck’s great-granddaughter is the author of this book and takes the reader through the journey of Keck’s young adult life. She focuses on Keck’s time at Vassar, starting in 1884. The author draws
In the thirteen personal essays in Grammar Lessons, Michele Morano connects the rules of grammar to the stories we tell to help us understand our worlds. Living and traveling in Spain during a year of
?More than any other American before or since, Abraham Lincoln had a way with words that has shaped our national idea of ourselves. Actively disliked and even vilified by many Americans for the vast m
Robert Scholes’s now classic Rise and Fall of English was a stinging indictment of the discipline of English literature in the United States. In English after the Fall, Scholes moves from id
This beautiful and comprehensive guide, many years in the making, is a manual for identifying the butterflies of Iowa as well as 90 percent of the butterflies in the Plains states. ??? It begins by pr
We live in a world of talk. Yet Race Sounds argues that we need to listen more—not just hear things, but actively listen—particularly in relation to how we engage race, gender, and class differences.
Whether sitting in a boat with a rod and reel trying to outwit a largemouth bass or watching bluntnose minnows dart among the rocks of a sparkling stream, many people are attracted to fish.?Hundreds o
In a lyrical mix of natural science, history, and memoir, Melissa L. Sevigny ponders what it means to make a home in the American Southwest at a time when its most essential resource, water, is overex
The Romantic poet John Keats, considered by many as one of the greatest poets in the English language, has long been the subject of attention from scholars who seek to understand him and poets who see
Confident or fretful, solemn or sassy, tough or tender, casual or formal: the self you project in writing—your persona—is the byproduct of numerous decisions you make about what to say and how to say
