Books published by The Backwaters Press

A stark, visceral collection of free verse and prose poetry, Skin Memory scours a wild landscape haunted by personal tragedy and the cruel consequences of human acts in search of tenderness and regeneration. In this book of daring and introspection, John Sibley Williams considers the capriciousness of youth, the terrifying loss of cultural identity and self-identity, and what it means to live in an imperfect world. He reveals each body as made up of all bodies, histories, and shared dreams of the future. In these poems absence can be held, the body’s dust is just dust, and though childhood is but a poorly edited memory and even our well-intentioned gestures tend toward ruin, Williams nonetheless says, “I’m pretty sure, everything within us says something beautiful.” ┬á

In Stunt Heart, Mary Jo Thompson’s debut collection,a female gaze locates the ironies inside the subjects of marriage and death, loneliness and love, speaking and silence. The title plays on both sick hearts and circus tricks, and appropriately, these poems are direct, personal, and disarmingly emotive. Look at the end of the first poem, “Says Penelope,” where the speaker suddenly veers to “Newsflash: I sleep- / walk.” These stark moments of admission are used to perfection in the centerpiece sonnet series, “Thirteen Months,” the collection’s highlight. Distilled emotion over the illness and death of an estranged husband ranges in tone from the dark humor that compares the marriage to a used car to the elegiac imagery of protecting the family garden from frost. The shock of seeing the deceased in his casket looking like a cross between Clark Gable and Dracula seasons the collection, recurring in ruminations on the various ways a body is prepared at death and the story of a mother who dies while sneezing. Although no one brings back the dead by writing poetry, in Stunt Heart,Thompson revisits them with credible humor and tough dispatches from bedrooms, graveyards, and hospital hallways. Thompson’s Stunt Heart jukes, dodges, and prays while muscling through all manners of demise and in the process reveals how one can turn grief into speech, art into grieving.

Twang offers readers the increasing power of the voice and the danger of one''s words being used against them. What can save you can also make you wretch. Repentance, in Twang, is a great idea but something far off. What is the speaker offered in its place? You can leave. You can find some way out.

"In ELECTRIC SNAKES, Adrian C. Louis''s thirteenth poetry collection, no one is spared his critical eye, including himself. These powerful and often humorous poems cover myriad subjects: Trump, music, zombies, Jimmy John''s, childhood, caller ID, venetian blinds, magpies, love, and Mom."—From the Editor

ΓÇ£From jump, there was such sonic, emotional, and intellectual drive to these poems, that I couldnΓÇÖt resistΓÇôwhy would I want toΓÇôthe pull of Benjam├¡n Naka-Hasebe KingsleyΓÇÖs vision and sensibility. Verve and ├⌐lan are words I might use, but they lack sufficient verve and ├⌐lan. And if I wrote, ΓÇÿhis future is bright, ΓÇÿ IΓÇÖd be wrongΓÇôhis future is here, and this book is as much fire as I can ask for.ΓÇ¥ —Bob Hicok, author of Hold

"Todd Robinson has written such tender love poems in MASS FOR SHUT-INS that you might read them to your significant other and hope for success—a veritable Neruda of Nebraska. In ''Skin,'' the speaker is ''a soft / ravening / hominid torched / by rosewater/ & coconut oil.'' The poems are no less fervent toward the old sod, beautifully evoking the contemporary Midwest. He feels ''the jolt of coal trains / through the gut of steaming America.'' A splendid debut."—Therese Svoboda

2019 Nebraska Book Award The poems in this collection move into the past with her mother and father and also explore the present both with family and culture. The poems range in quick flourishes of conventional subjects rendered in exquisite imagery and observations to everyday occurrences that are suddenly spiked with clear focus and complex movements. Saiser’s poems are intricate and graceful in their treatments of numerous subjects, including landscape and evening, grocery stores and roadways, death and birth, love and loss, where sudden realizations seem at once deep and clear and natural. The voice in these poems is fluid and sure.

2018 Nebraska Book Award 2018 WILLA Literary Award This collection of poems by the State Poet of Nebraska covers significant emotional territory while remaining firmly grounded in the landscape. From memories of the isolation and beauty of growing up on a farm, to a burgeoning awareness as a teenager of the economic and cultural forces waged against family farming, to coming to terms with the legacies of her parents after their passing, and, finally, arriving at an appreciation of nature and the environment wherever and whenever she finds it, Twyla M. Hansen offers poems that are alternately sad, sweet, funny, moving, human, and humane.

Watching the Perseids: The Backwaters Press Twentieth Anniversary Anthology features poems from authors from the past 20 years. This anthology commemorates The Backwaters PressΓÇÖs 20 years as a nonprofit literary publisher located in Omaha, Nebraska. Virtually every poet published by the press in its first two decades is represented here with two new, previously unpublished poems selected specifically for this volume.

The general theme of this book, and a number of its individual poems, is that love and language create community. There is little self- reference and confession. Set in Gloucester, New York, or Paris, in Panama or Newtown, the poems come from a commitment to civic poetry, a poetry of social place and witness. Civic poetry is poems written for the public on community topics; poetry accessible to an attentive, general audience. And since it is often meant to be read in public, civic poetry relies on sound and familiar forms: rhyming tricks, assonance, consonance, regular rhythms, refrain and stanza, couplets, etc. And of course, civic poetry, like all poetry, is insightful, well-crafted and fresh, never talks down, and is never watered down.Besides accessibility, sound, rhythm, and freshness, there is another necessary ingredient in civic poetry: hope. Not innocent or immature hope, nothing naive. It may be a battered hope, even diminished, but is not cowed or faint, remains brassy, unabashed. Civic poetry makes no apologies for believing in our stressed and distorted, but wonderful national experiment.

In Firer''s poems, place, often the western shore of Lake Michigan, provides an imagistic and sonic landscape in which language explores the ''empire of skin'' with its daily happinesses and sorrows, gifts and losses. Often blue light illuminates these poems and frequently the language of a Catholic childhood shows up. Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams''s poems say ''Use everything,'' and Firer does: receipts, anatomy, astronomy, clothes poles, paintings, checklists, quagga mussels, questions and grapefruit. Birds fly through these poems, insights too: ''For a minute / we are disguised / as human.'' That quote concisely sums up Firer''s main attentions: transience and time and with what and how we fill our brief time here on earth.

DRONE is a lyric meditation on modern warfare, in our technological and digital age. Written from a variety of perspectives and personas, it explores the human, animal, personal, and domestic aspects of the wars being fought by the US for incomprehensible reasons with indefinable outcomes. Swift and wide ranging, these poems explore experiences of soldiers, military families, prisoners, immigrants, and more.

2017 Nebraska Book Award┬á This new collection by Nebraska poet Marjorie Saiser explores the notion of witnessing. Particularly in our technological age, when we have access to international news as it happens, the question comes up: what responsibility do individuals—including those living in relatively quiet middle America—have in regard to world events? The poems in I Have Nothing to Say about Fire reference autobiographical elements: marriage, children, parents, in-laws, etc., but they also reference global tragedy: war, terrorism, genocide. As we experience our own personal losses and triumphs, what relationships should we strive for with family, friends, neighbors, and the strangers around us, particularly as their narratives push them forward into our and/or the public’s consciousness? In this book, Marjorie Saiser explores these essential questions and offers potential answers that may help all of us.

"With unflinching stanzas threaded through with grief''s relentless lyric, THE DAUGHTER''S ALMANAC is a masterwork, a deftly crafted illustration of the myriad ways beauty collides with pain. Succinct and utterly memorable, these poems take hold of the heart and tug it toward an insistent light. We are washed alive in that light. We are changed by it."—Patricia Smith, 2014 Backwaters Prize Judge

"Brings Plenty has come into his own power with this new book of poems. These are the poems of a hardcore rez visionary who is ''. . . map(ping) the spirit world . . . .'' Each poem carries a light born of struggle, and like vision, each illumination has its costΓǪPersonal history is utterly tied to the historical DNA of family, a place. Through the journey of these poems, a map emerges. In this map, you will find a way home."—Joy Harjo, Mvskoke poet, musician, performer, professor

"amazing poems of sheer, narrative abundance" / Naomi Shihab Nye

"Zeina Hashem Beck crafts a multifaceted portrait of the people and the streets of Beirut. Part love-letter, part elegy, Hashem Beck''s debut collection keeps the city from becoming ''a shadow of a memory, / the memory of a shadow'' for poet and reader both, offering us instead ''labyrinths / in which we get lost on purpose.'' This collection is as vibrant and sensitive as its subjectΓÇöthe city that ''understands / not being tired of being.'' Join me in an enthusiastic welcome for a compelling new voice in Anglophone poetry."—John Hennessy

"In COME NOW, Rodger Gerberding reminds us of just how necessary the modernist''s dogged desire to employ everything in the world: philosophies, myths, ideologies, art, snippets of conversation, jokes, the detritus of popular culture, to lyric effect has been for denizens of the so-called information age. These poems reflect a probing intellect and an emotional candor that position Gerberding as a poet who is utterly convinced by the urgent need for poetry in our contemporary world, and one who sets out to remind us of the beauty that is produced when a gifted writer practices what he believes."ΓÇöKwame Dawes

"Culture''s cloud chamber and its millions of random vectors drive Aaron Anstett''s INSOFAR AS HERETOFORE. ''Whatever scintillants'' he calls them in ''One Theory,'' an exclamation that''s half-prayer and half come-and-get-me bravado. The poems catch our socio-linguistic lightning flashes, at times fusing the erotic and the spiritual. This book is original and beautiful."—Michael Heller