After Long Busyness: Interviews with Eight Heartland Poets compiles a series of interviews with poets who have a connection to South Dakota.
Originally conducted for poet and editor Eric Lochridge's After Long Busyness: A Poetry Blog, the interviews reveal a surprisingly robust community of poets in the state, ranging from poet laureate David Allan Evans to prairie haiku master Chad Lee Robinson and the only non-South Dakotan in the series, Wayne Miller, who appeared at the South Dakota Festival of Books and shared his outsider's perspective.
The book also features conversations with
Patrick Hicks, who writes with an international point of view rooted in the cities of the prairie, and Jim Reese, whose rural confessionalism shatters preconceived ideas of what “heartland” poetry can be.
Likewise, Andy Thorstenson frees landscape poetry from easy cliché and trite description, writing instead with a perspective sensitive to the marvels of the wildlands we inhabit. Adrian M. Forrette provides the essential political voice of the social critic. Christine Stewart-Nuñez presents us with observations that continually reach for a deeper emotional core, whether she’s writing about her travels in Turkey or tweaking the image of a supermodel.
Taken as a whole, the book crystallizes the unexpected diversity of the poetry community in the land of infinite variety.
