Bristol Bay: and Other Poems

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Bristol Bay is the easternmost part of the Bering Sea and the site of the largest Salmon run in the world. It is also home to some of the highest tides and roughest water on the planet. In winter, ice storms freeze the riggings of fishing boats and the added weight of the ice, if not chipped off and thrown overboard, is sufficient to sink all bu

Reviews

From the back-breaking physical demands of blue-collar life on the seas and in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, and from the heartbreaking work of facing the realities of an exploited, endangered planet, Gary Lemons has carved these poems not of mere intelligence and compassion--which are abundantly self-evident--but of absolute necessity, and of genuine, hard-earned wisdom. --Sam Hamill

Gary Lemons' new collection of poems, Bristol Bay, is a brilliant coming-together of formal experience of lyric poetry and all the surprising voices that have scored his work over the years. Often my sense of this poetry is that it fearlessly goes out to meet the previously unattempted--that strange telegraphing that has spooked this nation's verse since Emily Dickinson. --Norman Dubie

Author Bio

Gary Lemons is a man who has worked most of his life with his hands. His discovery is that the act of writing poetry is little different than the act of building any structure. In the same way farmers contour a field in their imagination as they shape it with implements, Lemons explains, so do poets create with the mind and hand in harness. Lemons spent two years at the Undergraduate Poetry Workshop at the University of Iowa, studying poetry with Donald Justice, Norman Dubie, and former Poet Laureate Marvin Bell. Here he learned the suitable lessons that would later serve as foundation for insights wrangled from experience. He spent six years on the Assiniboine reservation in Wolf Point, Montana and is an honorary member of the Assiniboine tribe.