The Blizzard Voices by Ted Kooser “In a collection that has been presented as reader’s theater, Kooser evokes the voices of different people–men, women, teachers, children–taken by surprise when the ‘Children’s Blizzard’ of 1888 swept across the Midwestern plains. . . . The book is short but powerful.”—Omaha World-Herald “It’s the little details that make the stories vivid. . . . In just 64 pages, Kooser brings the people of the great blizzard back to life. You can feel the chill in these pages, hear the voices as if you and the speaker are huddled next to the stove, talking … Continue reading Praise for The Blizzard Voices

During September, save 25% on our football books, including Steve Smith’s Confessions of a Cornhusker Football fan and the story of the game of the century. Browse our football books here. Continue reading Save 25% on UNP football books!

irst books of poetry are generally a miscellany. There are the poems for one’s parents, the love and sex poems, the first person narratives, the gestures at style and quirkiness. In recent years, more and more poetry books have appeared built around a theme or obsession–a lynching in Indiana, say, or the 76 definitions of the word "fall," the death of a sibling, a harrowing divorce. Poets with first books want to be fashionable too. The problem is, our poems were not often composed with a theme in mind at all, but were each conceived in a vacuum, as though … Continue reading Finding the Theme

he Mover of Bones by Robert Vivian is truly a book of biblical proportion in more ways
than one.  It is a book that speaks of life and death in such a poetic way, you almost feel as if you are in church listening to a sermon written solely to make you think about
your life and how big of a mess you’ve made of it, and how on Earth you are going to start to pull it together.

Each story in this book has its own truth, warning, moral, and gospel-like lesson to be extracted.  Chapters cover life, death, resurrection, homosexuality, sodomy, abortion, and everything that might come in between.  Vivian does not stand on either side of a drawn line on any of these topics, but he does present such a crystal-clear situation that you as a reader are made to think about how you feel.

Continue reading “A book of biblical proportion”

ell, it seems we’ve gone and put the science fiction category to shame! In my attempts to drag myself through the dark finale of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, I seem to have killed my muse. It was either that or the guest pass to World of Warcraft and the flood of guests my own age distracting me from more mature pursuits.

No more apologies. Today, I step back to consider the lighter tales in science fiction, hopeful futures. My hopes for utopian visions in In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells were discouraged a bit by the introducer’s notes about the pessimistic, even murderous disposition of the main character. The pleasant old man in the tower in the prologue, however, turns out to be the same man. Instead of a first person account of the destruction of the world, Wells is still hopeful enough to give this character the vision and experience of a transformation that turns men into "angels."

Again, I borrow from the introducer, none other than Ben Bova, of his own science fiction fame. He, a more qualified judge of these things, also points out that Willie Leadford, is not the protagonist. The comet is.

Spoilers beyond what you can find on the back jacket follow…

Continue reading “Visions of Hope”