Thursday, January 24, 2013

New Poetry Book

I'd like to announce the publication of my first full-length poetry collection. Here's what some say:

Afterimage is an unsentimental but heartfelt elegy for the landscape and the people of the twentieth-century Midwest. The poems preserve the lost place, the lost time, and lost inhabitants, but Benjamin Vogt also celebrates the earth's own ability to flower and return, with human assistance and without.  These firm and carefully measured poems are a thoughtful delight, one that should not be missed.
-- Andrew Hudgins

Benjamin Vogt's rich, transporting gift is to see deeply, generously considering moments and scenes that preceded and sustain the lives we know, to dig curiously and calmly, alert for clues and remnants--to harvest more than any seed promised.
-- Naomi Shihab Ny


Using family photographs from the last century, Afterimage moves from the southern to northern Plains and the eastern Midwest, where the natural world calls out through open fields and dark woods, then through transient moments framed by gardens: a butterfly nectaring on a coneflower, planting lavender with his future wife, or autumn leaves crashing against a morning window. In a rich array of forms and evocative imagery, the poems in Afterimage reach through prairie history until grass becomes skin, and light becomes shadow.

You can buy it on Amazon or straight from the press. Then, do let me know what you think, either on Amazon, Goodreads, email, or here. Please? I'll give you a prairie. 

2 comments:

Mary Gray said...

Naomi Shihab Nye is one of my favorite poets. On her recommendation, I will be heading over to Amazon to purchase your book ASAP. Congrats on the book! Tell me your secret. How did you squeeze this in between teaching and gardening?

Benjamin Vogt said...

I don't squeeze in time. I can't work on one thing for very long before another replaces it. It's hard. But you can live a life fighting for your passions, or give up like too many others.