BiblioVault - Books about Route

The Route as Briefed

James Tate

University of Michigan Press, 1999

The Route as Briefed collects prose by Pulitzer Prize winning poet James Tate. It is an amazingly eclectic collection, offering essays, interviews, short-short stories, memoirs, and even a recipe for squirrel brains in black butter. The essays and interviews touch on themes ranging from poetic influences to MFA programs, and from the role of humor in poetry to the nature of regional writing. The fiction selections--none more than four pages long--are as engaging as their titles, e.g., Despair Ice Cream, Running for Your Life, Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee, Pie, and A Cloud of Dust. The memoirs include Tate's journal entries during a trip to Spain, and a long piece on the father he never met, killed in action during World War II.
In typical Tate style, the book continually straddles the line between fiction and autobiography, entertaining readers with amusing accounts of the poet's own experiences while drawing on these to narrate the fictional stories as well.
James Tate is Professor of Poetry, University of Massachusetts. He is the author of a number of books of poetry, including Worshipful Company of Fletchers: Poems, 1994; Selected Poems, 1991; Distance from Loved Ones, 1990. He has received several awards for his work, including the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1992.

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Route from Liverpool to Great Salt Lake Valley

Frederick Hawkins Piercy

Harvard University Press

This Is the Route of My Forefathers

The 1837 Ioway Map

William Green

University of Iowa Press, 2025

The state of Iowa is named for the Ioways, but most Iowans—and most Americans—know little about them. In This Is the Route of My Forefathers, William Green elevates an understudied history by synthesizing oral traditions, written records, and archaeological data to decode the 1837 map drafted by Ioway leaders. Spanning Indigenous settlements from Missouri to Wisconsin, this map was created to depict tribal history and defend tribal land claims at the height of the Indian removal era.

Illustrating nearly 200 years of Ioway history, the 1837 Ioway map provides insights into the tribe’s political and diplomatic strategies, their relationships with neighboring nations, and how they resisted and negotiated in the face of dispossession. This Is the Route of My Forefathers uses an interdisciplinary approach to reveal how group accounts may fade over time, while accounts of origin—legendary histories—remain rich and vibrant.

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