Times Beach, livre ebook

Winner of the Notre Dame Review Book Prize, this ambitious collection of poems evokes the cultural and environmental history of the Mississippi watershed and meditates on how its rivers are ceaselessly shaping, and shaped by, the lives around them. John Shoptaw guides us from the Mississippi’s headwaters in Lake Itasca to its delta in the Gulf of Mexico, weaving together episodes in the life of the river system—the New Madrid earthquakes, the 1927 flood, the EPA’s eradication of the dioxin-laced town of Times Beach—with his own memories of growing up in the Missouri Bootheel: picking cotton, being baptized in a drainage ditch, and working in a lumber mill. Formally renovative, the poems in Times Beach ring the changes on the big muddy place and hymn its everlasting possibilities.

Acknowledgments

Part 1.

• Blues Haiku
• Little River Coils
• Wahite

Two-step

Whereabouts

Girdled

On Jordan’s Stormy Banks

Fin

Tall Cotton

Salome

Red Letter Edition

Tongues

Fog Bound

Castor Glands

Probably Twice

• Oh Well

Part 2.

• Banvard’s Panorama
• Itasca
• Shuffle

The Great Comet of 1811

Plans for New Madrid

The Open Door

The Boy and the Mill

Buster Brown

Such Was Lucy Jefferson Lewis’s Hold

The Odds against Us

Believing Is Seeing

The Louisville Circulating Library

Rocky Hill Spring

Ghost Squirrels

Audubon’s Spanish Barb

Why Only Swamp Rabbits?

Keeper

Every Creeping Thing

The First Draft

Not a Chance

Tecumseh, His Jump

The Comet’s Coda

• Floodplain

Part 3.

• Crawfish Castle
• Ghastly Dew
• Red Cross Knight
• Heebie Jeebies: A Dream Masque

Part 4.

• Corn Maze
• Times Beach
• Operation Watershed
• The Dead Zone

Notes