Ultramegaprairieland

by Elisabeth Workman

Once upon a time, ancient glaciers oozed light through the general living room of America, scraping the terrain into the sweeping prairies of the Midwest, a superlatively grassy expanse in which American bison cavorted with dangerous electric fish-goats and no one got hurt. That was a long time ago. Then one day we woke up and it was everywhere: ULTRAMEGAPRAIRELAND.

Referentially crammed and brimming with cultural bling, the poems in ULTRAMEGAPRAIRIELAND range from forlorn to flipped out, citing and subverting far-flung sources high, holy, and WTF.

"I wrote all of the poems after moving back to the Midwest from the Middle East," explains Workman. "They are all somehow symptomatic of my inability to adjust, not to the Midwest per se, but just in general. Surviving the Midwest is all about juxtaposition."

Includes…
• Landscape with Porn Stars
• Yeti with Nihilists by a Fountain
• Probably the Song of the Unemployed Sith Lord
• Empathetic Jellyfish
• Bullets Built by Dad
• Other Cute Animals of the Big Prairies
• The Canadian Tuxedo in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
…and many more!

Elisabeth Workman was born and raised in the pharmaceutical suburbs of Philadelphia and has since lived in Boston, rural Pennsylvania, the Netherlands, Qatar, on/around the Standing Rock Nation of the Dakotas, and now in Minneapolis, where she lives with the designer/typographer Erik Brandt, their daughter, and two cats of the tuxedo variety. She is the author of numerous chapbooks, including Opolis (Dusie), with Michael Sikkema Terrorsim Is What Whale (Grey Book Press), and ANY RIP A THRESHOLD (Shirt Pocket Press). This is her first book-length collection.

Genres: Poetry

100 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2014

About the author

Elisabeth Workman was born in 1976 outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her work has appeared in _VeRT_, _Long Shot_, _So to Speak_, and _Myopia_ (a collaborative manifesto), among others. She has worked as a grant-writer for tribal organizations, a city planner for a small Midwestern town, a writer for public broadcasting, and a bartender at the Wrangler Inn in Mobridge, South Dakota. From 2002 to 2004, she served as a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Artist-in-Residence, conducting poetry workshops in schools throughout rural Pennsylvania. Her attraction to obscure locales has currently manifested itself in her residence in Doha, Qatar, where she lives with her husband and teaches writing at an international school. _a city_a cloud_, also from Dusie, is her first chapbook.

Reviews

[b · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a good book. The language is stupid-strong and makes me feel worse as a poet (and I like that feeling). I think maybe a smidgen more than 50 percent of the time Workman can't figure out how the hell to get out of an otherwise very strong poem, but I also get so sour when poets just have clever diversions to get out of poems over and over again, and so I almost enjoy this stubborn (bad?!) ending thing. I'm on a kick for anything undermining Arcadian, pastoral, or prairie based, and this is a perfect fit in this mode of reading I'm pursuing. If you know me and you like poetry, ask to borrow this book from me!

"Loops and a booming. Tumbleweed clings / to an emotional motel. A hill near the edge of / 'feminine features' gouged not by wind or / snowmelt but paroxysms: BREATHLESS HYMEN." (A small snip of my fav poem from the book entitled "Little Western").