Description
Poetry. Native American Studies. "From the first poem in SOUTHWEST BY MIDWEST, 'Prolog: The Pot Taking Shape" to the last, 'Epilog: At the Center of the Circle,' former Indiana Poet Laureate Norbert Krapf weaves a delicate, prescient tale of New Mexican and Arizonian indigenous aesthetics and poetry, its artists and the universe in clear, gentle and tactile language. Krapf shows not only a literary prowess but a consideration for cultural nuances not his own. With the last lines of his last poem, 'You too make love and music / that can save us all. You too / live and breathe at the center,' he connects us back to the beginning: to language and ourselves. A beautiful book."—Shonda Buchanan
Author Bio
Jasper native and former Indiana poet Laureate Norbert Krapf's previous poetry volumes include Bloodroot: Indiana Poems, a retrospective collection of 175 poems, INDIANA HILL COUNTRY POEMS (Dos Madres Press, 2019), Catholic Boy Blues, about surviving abuse in childhood by a priest, and The Return of Sunshine, about his Colombian-German- American grandson, Peyton. His most recent book is SOUTHWEST BY MIDWEST (Dos Madres Press, 2020). His poems and prose have appeared in over eighty anthologies, including Heartland II: Poems of the Midwest, and hundreds of times in magazines and journals. His Homecomings: A Writer's Memoir, a sequel to his The Ripest Moments: A Southern Indiana Childhood, is forthcoming. He has received the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, The Glick Indiana Author Award, and a Creative Renewal Fellowship from the Arts Council of Indianapolis. He has a poem in stained-glass at the Indianapolis International Airport, poems on IndyGo Buses, and Garrison Keillor read his poems on The Writer's Almanac. With pianist-composer Monika Herzig, he released a poetry and jazz CD, Imagine, and he collaborates with Indiana bluesman Gordon Bonham. He has also collaborated with Indiana photographers Darryl Jones, David Pierini, and Richard Fields. Since retiring in 2004 as a Professor of English at Long Island University, where he taught for thirty-four years and for eighteen directed the C.W. Post Poetry Center, he has lived with his family in downtown Indianapolis. He loves to spend time in New Mexico and Arizona.
Author City: INDIANAPOLIS, IN USA