Nebraska

Poems

Kwame Dawes

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781496221445
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

Kwame Dawes is not a native Nebraskan. Born in Ghana, he later moved to Jamaica, where he spent most of his childhood and early adulthood. In 1992 he relocated to the United States and eventually found himself an American living in Lincoln, Nebraska. In Nebraska, this beautiful and evocative collection of poems, Dawes explores a theme constant in his work—the intersection of memory, home, and artistic invention. The poems, set against the backdrop of Nebraska's discrete cycle of seasons, are meditative even as they search for a sense of place in a new landscape. While he shovels snow or walks in the bitter cold to his car, he is engulfed with memories of Kingston, yet when he travels, he finds himself longing for the open space of the plains and the first snowfall. With a strong sense of place and haunting memories, Dawes grapples with life in Nebraska as a transplant.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• PART I
• How I Became an Apostle
• Advent
• The Barking Geese of Edenton
• The Immigrant Contemplates Death
• Fledge
• Longing for the Hall of the Deaf
• The Midwestern Sky
• First Winter
• Loneliness
• Dark Season
• Plain-Speaking
• Novela
• The Scent of the Cankerworm
• Dawn
• Chadron
• Sandoz Revisited
• The Enemy of Memory
• The Poor Man’s Sacrifice
• Bones
• Sponge
• On History
• PART II
• The Epoch of Lies
• Sea and Rain
• Purple
• Forgetting
• The Quality of Light
• In These Times
• Sugar
• “All Teeth and Smile”
• Sniper
• Long Distance
• Prairie
• Pleasure
• The Chronicler of Sorrows
• July Fourth
• PART III
• On Blindness
• Insomniac
• Bed Time
• Transplant
• Surviving, Again
• Sancho Panza
• The Messiness of Place
• Ambulation
• Falling Away
• On Picking Battles
• The Exile Remembers His Sisters
• Before Winter
• About Kwame Dawes