Description
Poetry. In IOWA, Travis Nichols turns the bleak cultural void of Midwestern adolescence into a sequence of stunning prose vignettes. Here, a coming-of-age consciousness articulates the knotty uncertainties of personal, social and familial anxieties in sentences as equally complex as the feelings they house: "The memories true or not against him seem to be turning to steam, as I turned, all the while thinking of chewing out alone through the ghostly meats." With youthful perplexity and zeal, a humorous and caustic violence of reflection drives this meditative, unclassifiable book. The scary truth is that the foreignness of private teenage cant was always asking the right questions. Now, we just have to listen: "Is this the right one thing you haunt? Looking at this one house year after year? Yes. It must be. Not to let you move on. That was the way out."
Author Bio
Travis Nichols was born in Ames, Iowa. He attended the University of Georgia and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he earned an MFA in poetry. He is the author of the novels THE MORE YOU IGNORE ME (Coffee House Press, 2013) and OFF WE GO INTO THE WILD BLUE YONDER (Coffee House Press, 2010) and two collections of poetry, IOWA (Letter Machine Editions, 2010) and SEE ME IMPROVING (Copper Canyon Press, 2010). From 2008 to 2012 he was associate editor of the Poetry Foundation's website and editor of its blog, Harriet. He now works at Greenpeace in Washington, DC.
Author City: WASHINGTON, DC USA