The family farm lies at the heart of our national identity, and yet its future is in peril. Rick Hammond grew up on a farm, and for forty years he has raised cattle and crops on his wife's fifth-generation homestead in Nebraska, in hopes of passing it on to their four children. But as the handoff nears, their family farm-and their entire way of life-are under siege on many fronts, from shifting trade policies, to encroaching pipelines, to climate change. Following the Hammonds from harvest to harvest, Ted Genoways explores the rapidly changing world of small, traditional farming operations. He creates a vivid, nuanced portrait of a radical new landscape and one family's fight to preserve their legacy and the life they love.

Shortly after the third edition of "Leaves of Grass "was published, in 1860, Walt Whitman seemed to drop off the literary map, not to emerge again until his brother George was wounded at Fredericksburg two and a half years later. Past critics have tended to read this silence as evidence of Whitman's indifference to the Civil War during its critical early months. In this penetrating, original, and beautifully written book, Ted Genoways reconstructs those forgotten years--locating Whitman directly through unpublished letters and never-before-seen manuscripts, as well as mapping his associations through rare period newspapers and magazines in which he published. Genoways's account fills a major gap in Whitman's biography and debunks the myth that Whitman was unaffected by the country's march to war. Instead, "Walt Whitman and the Civil War "reveals the poet's active participation in the early Civil War period and elucidates his shock at the horrors of war months before his legendary journey to Fredericksburg, correcting in part the poet's famous assertion that the "real war will never get in the books."

This volume, the first to span the forty-year career of Nebraska state poet William Kloefkorn, brings together the best-known and most beloved poems by one of the most important Midwestern poets of the last half century. Collecting work from limited editions and hard-to-find books, along with Kloefkorn's most anthologized poems, "Swallowing the Soap" is an indispensable one-volume compendium of the work of a major American poet. "These poems aim for nothing less than the impossible: to understand what it means to be alive and human on this moveable earth," writes the editor, Ted Genoways. "Swallowing the Soap" is filled with the panoramic landscapes of Kansas and Nebraska, the stories of the rough and tender people who live there, and the moments of heartache, brutality, loss, and redeeming joy that shape their lives. It offers a vision, at once intimate and expansive, of the world of the Great Plains as seen by one of its most eloquent poets.

This book includes poems at the intersection of private stories and public history.Set against the bleak backdrop of the Yukon and the historical moment of the 1897 Klondike gold rush, this chronologically arranged series of sonnets is grounded in the lived experience of Finnish immigrants Anna and Abe Malm. Anna hauls her Anthony Wayne Washer into the wilderness and sets up a laundry business while Abe seeks his fortune. Anna and Abe share a unique history, revealed in the book's epigraph: Anna, nineteen years her husband's senior, had first raised him and then married him.Genoways' graceful formalism makes percussive music of a story marked by isolation and brutal difficulty. He manages a deft and plain-speaking rhyme that is in keeping with the tough lives his poems explore. The poems, which shift in frame from Anna's letters or Abe's diary to third-person verse that captures the characters' inner thoughts, bring the vitality of luminous detail and psychological depth to the arc of history.

In the Spanish-speaking world, Miguel Hernandez is regarded as one of the most important poets of the twentieth century-equal in distinction to Federico Garcia Lorca, Pablo Neruda, and Octavio Paz. He has never received his just acclaim, however, in the English-speaking world, a victim of the artistic oppression exercised during the period of Francisco Franco's totalitarian regime. Determined to silence the writer Neruda fondly referred to as his "wonderful boy," Franco sentenced Hernandez to death, citing as his crime only that he was "poet and soldier to the mother country." Despite the fact that complete and accurate versions of his work were difficult to obtain even in Spanish for nearly fifty years, Hernandez went on to achieve legendary status.
Now, for the first time, Ted Genoways makes Hernandez's extraordinary oeuvre available in an authoritative bilingual edition. Featuring some of the most tender and vigorous poetry on war, death, and social injustice written in the past century, nearly half of the poems in this volume appear in English for the first time, making it the most comprehensive bilingual collection of Hernandez's work available. Arranged chronologically, "The Selected Poems of Miguel Hernandez" presents Hernandez's remarkable emotional range as well as his stylistic evolution from the Romantic shepherd poet to poet of the prison cell. Thorough annotations and introductory essays illuminate the biographical basis for many of Hernandez's poems, while a foreword by Robert Bly and an afterword by Octavio Paz provide a striking frame for the work of this essential poet.
"What a victory it is to watch springing forth from our murky thicket of half-commercialized poetry the silver boar of Hernandez's words-to see the world of paper part so as to allow the language tusks and shoulders to emerge, shining, pressed forward by his genius. This generous selection of Miguel Hernandez's work, arranged, shepherded, and largely translated by Ted Genoways, is an immense gift for which all of us should be grateful."-from the Foreword by Robert Bly
"To gather Hernandez's poetry in such a large volume is to bring one of the 20th century's most important poets to life again. Without Hernandez, the world community of poetry would not be what it is today. "The Selected Poems" must be read if vital poetry is to continue another 100 years, with Hernandez's voice as a cherished example of why great poetry is timeless."--Ray Gonzalez, "Bloomsbury Review"
"As Philip Levine write in "The Kenyon Review," Hernandez is 'one of the great talents of the century, ' and this collection is a good place to discover (or rediscover) his moving verses."--"Virginia Quarterly Review"
"Vivid, often volatile imagery describes wrenching emotions and events in "The Selected Poems of Miguel Hernandez: A Bilingual Edition." . . . Raw, passionate, despairing and celebratory, these poems are a true discovery."--"Publishers Weekly"
"Arranged in three chronological sections, the poems presented are not the complete works, but they are a large and representative sampling of the best. This is certainly the most comprehensive bilingual edition of Hernandez's poetry available. In addition to the poems, the editor includes eight illustrations, important prefatory materials, and a short list of references, and an epilogue by Octavio Paz."--"Choice"