Recent Books by Art Homer--
Please note that though links to online sellers are given here, the author highly recommends ordering through your local bookseller if you are lucky enough to have one.
Blind Uncle Night--Wide-open spaces in the natural world: this is the world of Art Homer's poetry in Blind Uncle Night, with physical solidity, sweeping vistas, and expansive emotion, rendered with taut, sinewed craft. Sample Poems by Art Homer
“Art Homer’s poems are the real thing: products of a mind that experiences, observes, and reflects with love, intelligence, and awe. Impeccably crafted, these poems please both ear and tongue. Like his ‘Buck with a Broken Horn,’ they are quintessentially American, born of and rooted in ‘the land itself.’”—Charles Harper Webb
“Homer loses me when he writes about musicians. But when he writes about buzzards, dogs, ticks, dead deer, frogs being eaten by snakes, and a night with no vapor trails, he's spot on.”—James McMurtry
“The main focus of Blind Uncle Night is on nature and the outdoors, including the heavens. But if you’re looking for quiet fields of daisies, twittering bluebirds, and wispy moonbeams, look elsewhere. Art Homer has what W. C. Williams called ‘the ground sense necessary’ to take into account vultures, deer carcasses, snapping turtles, weeds, thunderheads, bugs, coyotes, and snake-eating frogs — elements which moved Hobbs to describe life in the state of nature as ‘nasty, brutish, and short’ but which Homer demonstrates are essential to its power, its appeal, its — yes — beauty. His lines are grounded in concrete particularity and a musician’s ear for sound and rhythm. Homer’s musicality also shows up in the poems about small-town/country life and the roots music that evolved from it — music, like Homer’s, conjured out of the personal landscapes of its creators. His is a reader-friendly landscape, but don’t forget your work-shirt and brogans.”—William Trowbridge
ISBN: 978-1936370788, 88 pages, $18.00
Order from Barnes and Noble
Order from Amazon
“Art Homer’s poems are the real thing: products of a mind that experiences, observes, and reflects with love, intelligence, and awe. Impeccably crafted, these poems please both ear and tongue. Like his ‘Buck with a Broken Horn,’ they are quintessentially American, born of and rooted in ‘the land itself.’”—Charles Harper Webb
“Homer loses me when he writes about musicians. But when he writes about buzzards, dogs, ticks, dead deer, frogs being eaten by snakes, and a night with no vapor trails, he's spot on.”—James McMurtry
“The main focus of Blind Uncle Night is on nature and the outdoors, including the heavens. But if you’re looking for quiet fields of daisies, twittering bluebirds, and wispy moonbeams, look elsewhere. Art Homer has what W. C. Williams called ‘the ground sense necessary’ to take into account vultures, deer carcasses, snapping turtles, weeds, thunderheads, bugs, coyotes, and snake-eating frogs — elements which moved Hobbs to describe life in the state of nature as ‘nasty, brutish, and short’ but which Homer demonstrates are essential to its power, its appeal, its — yes — beauty. His lines are grounded in concrete particularity and a musician’s ear for sound and rhythm. Homer’s musicality also shows up in the poems about small-town/country life and the roots music that evolved from it — music, like Homer’s, conjured out of the personal landscapes of its creators. His is a reader-friendly landscape, but don’t forget your work-shirt and brogans.”—William Trowbridge
ISBN: 978-1936370788, 88 pages, $18.00
Order from Barnes and Noble
Order from Amazon
The Drownt Boy "An abiding love for land, a love of strong, utilitarian beauty in horses, people, and books'' are the staff of life for Homer (Skies of Such Valuable Glass), whose journal of a taxing river voyage in the Ozarks is filled with lyrical, even mystical insights and asides. A three-day canoe trip at flood tide with his young stepson, Reese, is the vehicle for his wide-ranging thoughts grounded in his Ozark boyhood. While on the river, Homer is challenged not only by the demands of the present journey but also by a past that brought his family to the region. His tribute to the backwoods environment of his youth, when the ``Depression moved into the Ozarks, liked it, and retired there after World War II, letting the rest of the country go on with the boom times,'' is rich in appreciation of lore and language that is still tinged with Old English, and of a people in many ways unchanged for ages. From Publishers Weekly
"The book is part memoir, part nature writing and part travel writing. The combination adds drama to Homer's reflections on family, the Elizabethan dialect, nature and various Ozark peculiarities."--Kansas City Star
"Homer is a stylist who fills every sentence with sensations and rich histories. The poet's training is evident in his careful creation of every phrase, and this book proves he is a master storyteller as well. The Drownt Boy illuminates the region of the Ozarks and the best possibilities of writing itself."--Kansas City Star
"The Drownt Boy is a finely crafted picture of a place and time, and a man's reflections on them. Homer's style is as lean and vivid as the country he writes about. His narrative--part travel tale, part essay, part memoir of a family's life in the Ozarks a generation ago--flows like a mountain stream."--News Leader
"Art Homer's The Drownt Boy is a complex and magical evocation of place. Its Ozarks are made of the deep stuff of boyhood memory and family life and of a carefully described, present-day canoe trip down the Current River, taken at flood-stage, by Homer and his stepson. Both journeys--past and present--require an immersion in the language and lore of the place, combined with a disciplined attention to detail, as it is encountered or recollected."--Bloomsbury Review
Purchase from Amazon
Purchase from the publisher
Purchase from Barnes & Noble
"The book is part memoir, part nature writing and part travel writing. The combination adds drama to Homer's reflections on family, the Elizabethan dialect, nature and various Ozark peculiarities."--Kansas City Star
"Homer is a stylist who fills every sentence with sensations and rich histories. The poet's training is evident in his careful creation of every phrase, and this book proves he is a master storyteller as well. The Drownt Boy illuminates the region of the Ozarks and the best possibilities of writing itself."--Kansas City Star
"The Drownt Boy is a finely crafted picture of a place and time, and a man's reflections on them. Homer's style is as lean and vivid as the country he writes about. His narrative--part travel tale, part essay, part memoir of a family's life in the Ozarks a generation ago--flows like a mountain stream."--News Leader
"Art Homer's The Drownt Boy is a complex and magical evocation of place. Its Ozarks are made of the deep stuff of boyhood memory and family life and of a carefully described, present-day canoe trip down the Current River, taken at flood-stage, by Homer and his stepson. Both journeys--past and present--require an immersion in the language and lore of the place, combined with a disciplined attention to detail, as it is encountered or recollected."--Bloomsbury Review
Purchase from Amazon
Purchase from the publisher
Purchase from Barnes & Noble
Sight is No Carpenter--From the rural center of the Plains States, Nebraska, comes the graceful formal voice of Art Homer. Homer's poetry is an understated witness to experiences both stark and beautiful; his lines are always building, always making.
Sample Poems by Art Homer
"These poems have a somber and enduring magnificence. They are a testament to the salvational nature of all art, when that art has been fully lived and, what is rarer, fully wrought."--Jonathan Holden
ISBN: 1932339957, 80 pages, $17.00
Order from Barnes and Noble
Order from Powells
Order from Amazon
Sample Poems by Art Homer
"These poems have a somber and enduring magnificence. They are a testament to the salvational nature of all art, when that art has been fully lived and, what is rarer, fully wrought."--Jonathan Holden
ISBN: 1932339957, 80 pages, $17.00
Order from Barnes and Noble
Order from Powells
Order from Amazon
|
Selected Anthologies, Texts, Compilations
Yonder Mountain, inspired by poet Miller Williams's Ozark, Ozark: A Hillside Reader, is rooted in the literary legacy of the Ozarks while reflecting the diversity and change of the region. Readers will find fresh, creative, honest voices profoundly influenced by the landscape and culture of the Ozark Mountains. Poets, novelists, columnists, and historians are represented—Donald Harington, Sara Burge, Marcus Cafagna, Art Homer, Pattiann Rogers, Miller Williams, Roy Reed, Dan Woodrell, and more.
Anthony Priest is associate professor of English at Missouri State University–West Plains. Available from: http://www.uapress.com/titles/sp13/priest.html 
THE PUSHCART PRIZE XX
Best of the Small Presses edited by Bill Henderson AMAZON.COM BARNES & NOBLE LOCAL BOOKSELLER 
In Short: A Collection of Brief Creative Nonfiction
Judith Kitchen ed. with Mary Paumier Jones W.W. Norton, 1996 Delights and surprises await the reader in this rich gathering of Shorts (ranging from several paragraphs to two thousand words). From Diane Ackerman's fascination with hummingbirds, to Andrei Codrescu's idiosyncratic view of nostalgia, to Albert Goldbarth's free-wheeling riff on the universe, each Short becomes a sharply focused lens on an outer world or an inner sensibility. In Short, reflecting almost every way in which nonfiction can be written, is for all readers (and writers) who thrive on imaginative play and aesthetic satisfaction. Pick up this book; open it up. See if you can resist it. "The selection of authors is impressive, and the work consistently engaging. I'm already planning classes around In Short." —Bernard Cooper |
Out of Print &/or Collectible
Don't know why I chose the above image, except that I like it, and I think of my out-of-print books as injured chicks--and because the booksellers that have them don't post cover shots, though these are worthy of it:
Three are currently available: Tattoos from Greentower Press is a chapbook with a cool cover. Skies of Such Valuable Glass from Owl Creek Press also has a cool photo of Native American and Euro Americans at mass at Mission St Ignatius in the 40s. What We Did After Rain with wood cuts by James Anthony Crowely from Abbatoir Editions is worth it for being printed by Harry Duncan, dean of the fine press printers. All are available with a little searching from the online sources above. |
