Swallowing the soap
Subtitle: new and selected poems
By: William Kloefkorn ; edited and with an introduction by Ted Genoways.
Contributors: Genoways, Ted.
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Lincoln
Language: eng
Number of pages: 439
ISBN-13: 9780803234055
Description: "Kloefkorn is a perfect blend of poet, raconteur, and scholar ... Kloefkorn's poetry--perhaps like all poetry--is about the price of wonder. Wonder at nature, wonder at fate, and wonder--finally, luminously--at the miraculous depths and tributaries of the human soul."--Brent Spencer, Nebraska Life.

"Kloefkorn's style comes not only from long attention to the world, but from sustained immersion in the art and craft of language, and from granting himself the freedom to write at length and in depth about the people and places he cares about most. Such work can rise toward sublime visions of the interconnections of people and place."--Jeff Gundy, Georgia Review.

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. --Book Jacket.