Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
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.
“Winner of the Notre Dame Review Book Prize, Times Beach is an ambitious collection of poems by John Shoptaw that 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 . . . . A seminal body of work, Times Beach is very highly recommended for personal, community, and academic library Contemporary American Poetry collections and reading lists.” —The Midwest Book Review
John Shoptaw teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.
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