A soaring and vivid travelogue of dusty, dog-eared stories, people, and places exploring the long wide highway stretch of the American landscape and imagination. With great formal range, poems sing to American heroines like Rachel Carson, Julia Butterfly Hill, Zora Neale Hurston, and Loretta Lynn in between readers standing in places of nuanced and emotional power, such as Memphis’ Civil Rights Museum, Gettysburg, Salem, Pride Parade, Vietnam Memorial, and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s home. From wrestling with the epidemics of mass shootings and violence against women to racism and genocide, this collection does not tiptoe around the contradictions, strife, and injustice within the country. Yet somehow, together, the poems manage to breathe a small, mighty flame of genuine hope, keeping it alight – an astute look into America’s natural beauty, spiritual diversity, and steadfast ability to rise from the ashes. From the Grand Canyon’s hot red clay bottom of the rushing Colorado River to the pure pinpoint moments of an ending relationship at a midwestern train station, the collection’s multi-faceted lenses of distinctly U.S. history, ecology, religions, spirituality, cultures, and the natural world will leave you feeling “as if you licked the sweet and prickly layers of a pineapple.”
A soaring and vivid travelogue of dusty, dog-eared stories, people, and places exploring the long wide highway stretch of the American landscape and imagination. With great formal range, poems sing to American heroines like Rachel Carson, Julia Butterfly Hill, Zora Neale Hurston, and Loretta Lynn in between readers standing in places of nuanced and emotional power, such as Memphis’ Civil Rights Museum, Gettysburg, Salem, Pride Parade, Vietnam Memorial, and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s home. From wrestling with the epidemics of mass shootings and violence against women to racism and genocide, this collection does not tiptoe around the contradictions, strife, and injustice within the country. Yet somehow, together, the poems manage to breathe a small, mighty flame of genuine hope, keeping it alight – an astute look into America’s natural beauty, spiritual diversity, and steadfast ability to rise from the ashes. From the Grand Canyon’s hot red clay bottom of the rushing Colorado River to the pure pinpoint moments of an ending relationship at a midwestern train station, the collection’s multi-faceted lenses of distinctly U.S. history, ecology, religions, spirituality, cultures, and the natural world will leave you feeling “as if you licked the sweet and prickly layers of a pineapple.”
A.M. Hayden is a Poet Laureate and award-winning Humanities Professor. Over forty of her poems have been featured in journals and anthologies. Her debut collection, American Saunter, is forthcoming (FlowerSong Press, 2024) with her second collection, Old World Wings following (Wild Ink Publishing, 2025).
