{"product_id":"times-beach-paperback-softback-9780268017859","title":"Times Beach (Paperback \/ softback) 9780268017859","description":"\u003cfont face=\"Georgia\"\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"6\"\u003eTimes Beach\u003c\/font\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"4\"\u003eJohn Shoptaw (Author)\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e9780268017859\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003ePaperback \/ softback, published 15 February 2015\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e144 pages\u003cbr\u003e23.5 x 19.1 x 0.8 cm, 0.262 kg\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\u003cp align=\"justify\"\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"Winner of the Notre Dame Review Book Prize, Times Beach is an ambitious collection of poems by John Shoptaw that evokes the cultural and environmental history of the Mississippi watershed and meditates on how its rivers are ceaselessly shaping, and shaped by, the lives around them . . . . A seminal body of work, Times Beach is very highly recommended for personal, community, and academic library Contemporary American Poetry collections and reading lists.\" —\u003ci\u003eThe Midwest Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\"There's much to like about Times Beach, even for the casual poetry fan. John Shoptaw's strength is unhooking poetry from its past form—a strategic uncoupling of couplets—to turn the medium into its own monstrous and vital form of energy, all the while telling stories of great depth and enchanting readers with its realism. . . . Shoptaw's 'undercurrents' run deep, and give us a taste of what true originality represents.\" —\u003ci\u003ePopMatters.com\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\"John Shoptaw, a poet and professor at Berkeley, has written a book of poems that is as intricate and profound as the Mississippi River with its history, tributaries and deltas. Times Beach is an extremely well-made work that hearkens to Hart Crane and Walt Whitman, rhythm and blues, and the American experience of individual voices.\" —\u003ci\u003eSt. Louis Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\"The uncanny combination of experience and skills is what places John Shoptaw at the very summit of nature poets. He anchors his personal experiences in the Bootheel of southeast Missouri as touchstones while he floats the Mississippi watershed through time. An amazing feat.\" —\u003ci\u003eForeword Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eTimes Beach\u003c\/i\u003e is, like most interesting American books, an original. It's about a place, the watershed of the Mississippi River, and it is an ecopoetics. Best, perhaps, to think of it as a hybrid of Hart Crane, the depression photographs of Dorothea Lange, and a nineteenth-century lantern show—they called them 'panoramas'—of the human and environmental history of our mightiest river system. It comes from a deep sense of the rhythms and dialect of a place and from a deeply literary and inventive imagination.\" —Robert Hass, poet laureate of the United States (1995–1997) and author of \u003ci\u003eThe Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eTimes Beach \u003c\/i\u003eis brimming, teeming with life. John Shoptaw, with breathtaking expanse and lasting intricacy, somehow writes a book in which we traverse the vastness of the American landscape—its gorgeous yet misguided rivers, its achingly honest and flawed humans, its forgotten bayous and wildlife—with a hand made nimble by reverence. In this, he revivifies American poetry into an optimism that is nearly as infinite as it is pained. This, however, is the only true kind of optimism, and how good it is to have a book of poetry that restores us into that abundance.\" —Katie Ford, author of \u003ci\u003eColosseum\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eBlood Lyrics\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp align=\"justify\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eWinner of the \u003ci\u003eNotre Dame Review \u003c\/i\u003eBook Prize, this ambitious collection of poems evokes the cultural and environmental history of the Mississippi watershed and meditates on how its rivers are ceaselessly shaping, and shaped by, the lives around them. John Shoptaw guides us from the Mississippi's headwaters in Lake Itasca to its delta in the Gulf of Mexico, weaving together episodes in the life of the river system—the New Madrid earthquakes, the 1927 flood, the EPA's eradication of the dioxin-laced town of Times Beach—with his own memories of growing up in the Missouri Bootheel: picking cotton, being baptized in a drainage ditch, and working in a lumber mill. Formally renovative, the poems in \u003ci\u003eTimes Beach\u003c\/i\u003e ring the changes on the big muddy place and hymn its everlasting possibilities.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\u003c\/font\u003e","brand":"University of Notre Dame Press","offers":[{"title":"Brand New","offer_id":52520468873496,"sku":"9780268017859","price":17.27,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"url":"https:\/\/freshlyprintedbooks.co.uk\/products\/times-beach-paperback-softback-9780268017859","provider":"Freshly Printed Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}