by Paul Hedeen
In accounting for his new poetry collection, Paul Hedeen finds that his interests range widely. “Loss of direction, innocence, connection, spiritual direction, and love” all come under poetic consideration in this important new book.
Entitled When I Think About Rain and published by Final Thursday Press of Cedar Falls, this collection is the culmination of many years of careful crafting. Many of the collection’s 37 poems appear in print here for the first time, though others have previously appeared in noted literary magazines including the North American Review, The Northern Line, and The Mid-America Poetry Review.
Paul Hedeen is an award-winning professor and writer who teaches literature, film, and writing at Wartburg College. He is also the author of the novel, The Knowledge Tree (Sanbun Publishers), and the co-editor of Unrelenting Readers: the New Poet-critics (Story Line Press).
Final Thursday Press is an award-winning publisher of literary poetry and fiction. The press’s previous publications include Ghost Wars by Vince Gotera, Kyrie by Jonathan Stull, Lamentations on the Rwandan Genocide by Pierre-Damien Mvuyekure, and Vision of a New Past: Poems About America by Bill Chene.
When I Think About Rain has garnered praise from author Elton Glaser, who writes “When I Think About Rain stands out as a book that centers on people, alone or in community. It is, to use a phrase from the title poem, ‘thorned with stories that catch the heart.’ Hedeen’s clear-sighted tenderness make When I Think About Rain less a collection of damages than a solacing of difficult grace.”
Debra Marquart, author and professor at Iowa State University, similarly celebrates the emotional force of this collection. “The poems in When I Think About Rain move over the terrain of the reader like a complex weather front that first delivers blinding squalls and exhilarating downpours, then gently falling patches of rain that are like weeping.”
In the four sections of When I Think About Rain, poems vary in settings from central Ukraine to the Cedar Valley. Drawing on religious, philosophical, and personal insights, Hedeen notes that the emotional territory he covers includes “the quiet dignities of love and the raucous indignities of its loss and lack” and ends with “the affirmation that somehow everything is remembered and forgotten.”
by Bill Chene
“From the stage to the page”—that’s how Bill Chene describes his recent book, Vision of a New Past: Poems About America. This newly published collection of slam poetry offers whimsical yet often biting commentary on our country and its culture. The book consists of eleven poems from a man who lives with “a foot in two worlds,” referring to his work as an engineer at John Deere, and his work as a poet.
Chene, who has lived in Waterloo for the past four years, started doing slam poetry while living in Kalmazoo, Michigan. Slam poetry, which originated in Chicago, is a competition amongst performing poets, and it is all about style. As Chene notes, “How you deliver your words influences how successful your poem is going to be.” A good slam poem conveys the energy and passion that went into the writing, and it flows rhythmically to the listeners’ ears.
So how does one write slam poetry, something so reliant on performance? This is something that Chene says he struggled with in Vision of a New Past: Poems About America. “A lot of good slam poems don’t read well—the author isn’t there to convey the passion and the delivery… he has to make up for that in the writing.” Chene engineers this seemingly effortlessly, pun intended. The poems in his book read with a head-bobbing rhythm, and are often simultaneously playful and radical, as in the poem “Addiction”
It’s been nine hours
Since I’ve seen any television.
I’ve tried to quit watching
But it’s so darn hard, what with all of those
Zany sitcoms and flashy news shows
When we’re at war and dropping bombs.
The dichotomy of Chene’s position as engineer and poet is evident in his work; the key, he says, is balance. “If there’s a theme about America today, it is alienation…we’re all outsiders at one level or another, and I like to balance that with a little whimsy. It’s one thing to talk about how the world sucks, but you have to have humor to balance that out.”
Vision of a New Past: Poems about America will be published in a limited, signed, and numbered edition. It will be available directly through Final Thursday Press (geocities.com/finalthursdaypress) and at select local booksellers including Bought again Books, Roots Market, and the Hearst Center for the Arts. The collection will feature original cover art by Cedar Falls native, Aaron Bos-Wahl. |
