Negotiating the no man s land between ages nine and thirteen, this memoir of a small-town boy s life in 1940s Kansas continues the story William Kloefkorn began in his much-loved volume This Death by Drowning. With characteristic humor and in prose as lyrical as his best poetry, Kloefkorn describes the unsentimental education he received at the hands of the denizens of Urie s Barber Shop and the Rexall Drugstore and at the knees of the true characters who made up his family. From the firefly stunt that nearly burns down his home to the distant firestorms of World War II, fire holds an...

Whether writing about a boyhood in the Great Depression, the bond between a young man and his family, digging storm cellars and ducking tornadoes, or the dropping of the atomic bomb as experienced by a paperboy in small-town Kansas, Kloefkorn brings a congenial mixture of seriousness and humor to his subjects. Here and there the commonplace lends itself to the not-so-common question: What is the odd relationship between power, terror, and beauty? Why are human beings torn between staying put and moving in intellectual and spiritual as well as physical terms? And how much of who we are is...

The first volume in William Kloefkorn's four-part memoir which, when completed, will cover the four elements: water, fire, earth, and air. This Death by Drowning is a memoir with a difference-an artfully assembled collection of reminiscences, each having something to do with water. The book's epigraph, from Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It, proclaims, "I am haunted by waters." So-and in most rewarding ways-is William Kloefkorn. The first chapter recalls the time when, at age six, the author "came within one gulp of drowning" in a Kansas cow-pasture pond, only to be saved by his...

Negotiating the no man's land between ages nine and thirteen, this memoir of a small-town boy's life in 1940s Kansas continues the story William Kloefkorn began in his much-loved volume This Death by Drowning. With characteristic humor and in prose as lyrical as his best poetry, Kloefkorn describes the unsentimental education he received at the hands of the denizens of Urie's Barber Shop and the Rexall Drugstore and at the knees of the true characters who made up his family. From the "firefly" stunt that nearly burns down his home to the distant firestorms of World War II, fire holds an...

This work is a collection of new poems by the Nebraska State Poet, who is widely acclaimed for his poetry dealing with the land and people of the Great Plains.

The tell-all memoir takes on new meaning in the work of poet William Kloefkorn, whose accounts of the moments and movements of life touch on everything that matters, the prosaic and the profound, the extraordinary in the everyday, and the familiar in the new and strange. The fourth and final installment in Kloefkorn s reflections, Breathing in the Fullness of Time, departs from the elements ruling the other volumes water, fire, and earth and floats its insights and observations, its memories and anecdotes on the now wild, now whispering element of air. Kloefkorn is a consummate...

This volume, the first to span the forty-year career of Nebraska state poet William Kloefkorn, brings together the best-known and most beloved poems by one of the most important Midwestern poets of the last half century. Collecting work from limited editions and hard-to-find books, along with Kloefkorn s most anthologized poems, Swallowing the Soap is an indispensable one-volume compendium of the work of a major American poet. These poems aim for nothing less than the impossible: to understand what it means to be alive and human on this moveable earth, writes the editor, Ted Genoways....

Whether writing about a boyhood in the Great Depression, the bond between a young man and his family, digging storm cellars and ducking tornadoes, or the dropping of the atomic bomb as experienced by a paperboy in small-town Kansas, Kloefkorn brings a congenial mixture of seriousness and humor to his subjects. Here and there the commonplace lends itself to the not-so-common question: What is the odd relationship between power, terror, and beauty? Why are human beings torn between staying put and moving-in intellectual and spiritual as well as physical terms? And how much of who we are is...