River Readers

Poems of the human predicament encompassing grief, outrage, humor.

With Ted Kooser what you see is what you get. He is one of America's most loved contemporary poets. Kooser describes the intricacies of human relationships as well as the universal human desire for connection with others.

Ada Limon gives us reflections on mortality, womanhood, and the human body. She offers us the question of how we should treat each other in this life. Her answer: like humans. Full of nourishing and passionate poems.

This is Lisa Beamer's personal account of her husband, Todd Beamer and the passengers of Flight 93, their courage and brave actions, when their plane was hijacked on September 11, 2001. The United Airlines flight was en route to San Francisco, California when it was taken over and directed back toward Washington D.C. possibly to be used as a weapon against the White House or the U.S. Capitol. The flight attendants and passengers decided to take matters into their own hands and take a stance against their hijackers.

During the decade known as the Dirty Thirties, America's High Plains were plagued by the massive dust storms that nearly turned the what was once the nation's proud grasslands into a desert. Timothy Egan has written the definitive book on the Dust Bowl and the people who survived the black blizzards.

Laura Brooks returns to her hometown of Hannibal, Missouri ten years after the 1993 flood that devastated towns all up and down the Mississippi River including Hannibal. Integrating the small river town's history and devotion to Mark Twain with Laura's own life, Melissa Scholes Young writes a captivating story of what home means to most of us and full of energetic characters.

In this short book of poems all bearing the same title Terrance Hayes wrote poems within the first one hundred days of the Trump presidency. He speaks to us of our country's past and future errors.

Billy Collins served as United States Poet Laureate from 2001-2003. His poems are both funny and poignant for today's life and times.

This is a novel that shifts between the time period of 1938 and 1989, two momentous years. 1938 was the year of Kristallnacht in Germany, the year before the start of World War II. 1989 was the year the wall came down between a divided Germany that had been separated since the end the war in 1945. Kristoff, a young apprentice to master stamp engraver, Frederick Faber, is suddenly forced to engrave stamps for the Nazi government.

Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Charles Wright, pens visual images of the changing of the seasons, the significance and the insignificance of being human, as well as the sacredness and mystery of the world around us.

Fate brings three unlikely characters together in Kristin Harmel's poignant story of Nazi-occupied Paris in the 1940s. Ruby Henderson is an American who recently loses her husband, French resistance fighter, Marcel Benoit. Broken-hearted after the loss of her baby and husband, Ruby decides to join the French resistance against all the odds and help downed air pilots make their way back home to fight again another day. Eleven-year-old Charlotte Dacher lives across the hall from Ruby in the same apartment building.

A small but powerful book of poems depicting the anguish and sorrow of women and children during the ethnic cleansing and genocides of South Asia during the Partition of India and Pakistan. The Partition remains one of the largest human forced migrations in history.

This is the story of two sisters, Vianne and Isabelle during World War Two in France. The Nazis have occupied their small village of Carriveau. Both sisters struggle with their relationship to each other. Isabelle is far more daring and outrageously impulsive than her older sister who simply wants to lead a quiet life with her husband and her daughter, Sophie. It is Isabelle who meets the danger of Nazi occupation head on and soon joins the resistance unwittingly putting Vianne and her family in danger.

Caroline Kaufman pens with a rawness and rare insight into these powerful poems about teenage depression and sexual abuse and the struggle for recovery.

This is a new collection of poems by former Missouri Poet Laureate Walter Bargen depicting people and places and times that are and have been.