Cheat Grass
Publisher: Utah State Poetry Society
Published: 1999
Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 63
Description: A book of poems about the author's grandparents, Olive and Vernon Tobler, who lived in southern Utah and Salt Lake City during the Great Depression.  It is a story of hardship, jealousy, endurance, and the small joys and daily lives of one family in a particular time. 

Kenneth W. Brewer:  I believe that one way a poet can serve society is to be its 'emotional historian.'  This poet performs that role very well.  We learn through these poems how two human beings lived their lives in a particular time and a particular place; we learn not only what they did, what happened to them, but also how they felt and what they thought.

This collection is more than a bunch of poems written by a single author; it is a story that makes us richer for having read it.
Table of contents: title: Part One; title: Summer's end; title: First Sight; title: The Tune; title: Wedding Photo, 1915; title: When Tumbleweeds Hum; title: The Basic Tune of the Sparrow; title: Opportunity; title: Ordinary Light; title: While the Children Sleep; title: Unarmed; title: South with the Birds; title: Some Sundays; title: Oh!; title: Nit-Picking; title: When You live with a Jealous Man; title: Vision in Red; title: A Necklace of Houses; title: Someone is Coming; title: Distraction; title: Quarantine; title: Advent; title: Hangers-on; title: Part Two; title: Watercolor; title: Begin from the Bottom; title: Lucky Penny; title: Sweeping; title: The Sun-Hot Boulders; title: The Cedar Waxwing Speaks; title: Cheat Grass; title: In His Absence; title: Proverbs; title: Olive's Lard Bucket; title: To be Good at Something.; title: Home Cures; title: Slow Clouds; title: Some Things They Say About Olive and Vernon; title: Orion's Sword; title: Domestic; title: Olive's Magic Pie Crust; title: Again; title: Evaporation; title: Shirley's Shoes; title: Saving the Dishwater; title: Mockingbird; title: Walter; title: Looking for Letters; title: Not Listening; title: After the Rain; title: A Draft of Icy Air