University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023 eISBN: 978-0-8229-9016-1 | Paper: 978-0-8229-6712-5
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Winner of the 2023 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize
Trailer Park Psalms traces the speaker’s journey beyond his boyhood trailer park, through an American landscape marked by violence—from a gas line explosion in his hometown to his father’s war memories to the scars of colonialism inscribed in place, language, and ecology. Along the way, he searches for sources of awe that might inspire us, even in a compromised world: the everyday miracle of eyesight, the courage of the Voyager spacecrafts, and the “clumsy kindness” of family members trying to mend the damages of the past. In the end, what he finds isn’t faith but the hope that “if there’s a heaven, we will bend / to examine our old selves / and wonder how something so delicate / was ever allowed.”
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Ryler Dustin has represented Seattle on the final stage of the Individual World Poetry Slam, and his poems appear in outlets like Verse Daily, Gulf Coast, and The Best of Iron Horse. He is the author of Heavy Lead Birdsong from Write Bloody Publishing. A graduate of the MFA program at the University of Houston and the PhD program at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, he has lived in Michigan, Spain, the Jack Kerouac House in Orlando, and an off-grid cabin in Oregon. He recently moved back to his hometown of Bellingham, Washington.
REVIEWS
"There’s a rural charm and sense of danger lurking in Trailer Park Psalms, but it is exactly the perpetual threat of poverty and violence that make the pieces sing." —Adriana E. Ramírez, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
One.
Trailer Park Psalm
A Secret
Memorial Day
Light Years
First Star
Baptism at Agate Bay Mobile Home Park
Two
Self-Portrait with Cracked Memories
Last Night in London
Still Life
Wood and Wire
Staying with the Musician
Reading Basho in Bergen
The Movement of Fields
In the Bones
Three
A Woman Explains the Presence of Bison
Interstate Five
A Brief History of Bordeaux, Washington
Homestead
Four
Confession in a Wheat Field Approaching My Hometown
Riddle, Oregon
Visitation
Whatcom Creek Memorial Trail
To Make Color
Song for Voyagers
Cedar Pollen Psalm
Late Garden
Love Poem with Stinging Nettles
Names of Trees
Hunger
Notes
Acknowledgments
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