When the sun nears nova, David Jones, a writer, is offered a chance to escape via an experimental transmat booth

Deus Ex Machina

Literature & Fiction

Brummels, J.V.

United States

Spectra

Winside, Nebraska rancher and Wayne State College English and Creative Writing teacher J.V.Brummel's new book of poems, Cheyenne Line is a poetry hat trick: not a word out of place, no baloney, no solipsistic search for self or meaning or some undefined thing in academia we find in so much poetry these days. Brummels' throws are true: the cuts, clips, and brands each poem distinctly as a J.V. Brummels poem. Nobody's going to get these poems mixed up in the herd. Cheyenne Line and other poems is a powerful achievement by this gifted writer in mid-career.

Cheyenne Line and Other Poems

Poetry

THE BACKWATERS PRESS

JV Brummels’ latest collection is frontpew@paradise is Brummels’ best work to date; while the poems—as in his earlier collections, 614 Pearl, Cheyenne Line, City at War, Book of Grass, among others—focus upon the daily and particular concerns of the Great Plains and of ranch life, frontpew places Brummels’ readers up close and personal into the sermon that a long life may be. The poems are not didactic by any means, but they are wise and contemplative, as the long road to paradise may be paved.

frontpew@paradise

Stephen F. Austin University Press

JV Brummels’s newest collection, All the Live-Long Day, continues the legacy of a strong-voiced, strong-armed poetry. As the title suggests in a mocking, self-effacement, these are the poems of a man who has been working, perhaps not on the railroad, but in the classroom, in the fields, with his horses and his cattle. Brummels’s poetry is simultaneously poised on humor and drop-dead seriousness, where “an education’s learning / how much to let slip / and when to let go.” The “punchline” for a long working life is “I’ve made a life flirting with regret / For all my bitching I’m the man / I want to be.” Who is that, then? The man who admits that he’s a smart ass, a “whiskerless schoolmarm / trying to be / a thirty-foot hard-twist snake / of an arena rope, “ “a black cat in a back alley / behind a bar” before he tends to the business of branding. And yet, for all that hard word and all that hard self-appraisal, the persona is able to “think machine and horsepower / and horse / I smell cow on the breeze.”

All the Live-Long Day

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Brummels, J.V.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Brummels, J.V.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Brummels, J.V.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Deus Ex Machina

Cheyenne Line and Other Poems

frontpew@paradise

All the Live-Long Day