Nebraska: Poems

by Kwame Dawes

Kwame Dawes is not a native Nebraskan. Born in Ghana, he later moved to Jamaica, where he spent most of his childhood and early adulthood. In 1992 he relocated to the United States and eventually found himself an American living in Lincoln, Nebraska.

In Nebraska, this beautiful and evocative collection of poems, Dawes explores a theme constant in his work—the intersection of memory, home, and artistic invention. The poems, set against the backdrop of Nebraska’s discrete cycle of seasons, are meditative even as they search for a sense of place in a new landscape. While he shovels snow or walks in the bitter cold to his car, he is engulfed with memories of Kingston, yet when he travels, he finds himself longing for the open space of the plains and the first snowfall. With a strong sense of place and haunting memories, Dawes grapples with life in Nebraska as a transplant.
  Purchase the audio edition.

Genres: Poetry

120 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2019

About the author

Born in Ghana in 1962, Kwame Dawes spent most of his childhood and early adult life in Jamaica . As a poet, he is profoundly influenced by the rhythms and textures of that lush place, citing in a recent interview his "spiritual, intellectual, and emotional engagement with reggae music." His book Bob Marley: Lyrical Genius remains the most authoritative study of the lyrics of Bob Marley.

His 11th collection of verse, Wisteria: Poems From the Swamp Country, was published in January 2006. In February, 2007 Akashic Books published his novel, She's Gone and Peepal Tree Books published his 12th collection of poetry, Impossible Flying, and his non-fiction work, A Far Cry From Plymouth Rock: A Personal Narrative.

His essays have appeared in numerous journals including Bomb Magazine, The London Review of Books, Granta, Essence, World Literature Today and Double Take Magazine.

In October, 2007, his thirteenth book of poems, Gomer's Song will appear on the Black Goat imprint of Akashic Books. Dawes has seen produced some twenty of his plays over the past twenty-five years including, most recently a production of his musical, One Love, at the Lyric Hammersmith in London .

Kwame Dawes is Distinguished Poet in Residence, Louis Frye Scudder Professor of Liberal Arts and Founder and executive Director of the South Carolina Poetry Initiative. He is the director of the University of South Carolina Arts Institute and the programming director of the Calabash International Literary Festival, which takes place in Jamaica in May of each year.

Reviews

[Bandit · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nebraska isn’t a place one might normally think of as poetry inspiring. Then again, apparently poetry can be written about anything. Moreover, apparently anything can be poetry.
Seriously? When did they do away with conventional poetry things like rhymes, stanzas, etc.
Apparently, nowadays you can just arrange a text, any text a certain way (with very few words per line) and call it poetry. I can probably do that to this review if I wanted to.
The idea seems to be compensating for the absence of proper format and rhymes with imagery. And maybe some sort of a rhythms. Sure enough, there’s plenty of nice imagery here. Again, for Nebraska, anyway.
The author (who isn't a native, but lives there and speaks from experience) does a good job of conveying the sense of place. But the rest of it didn’t really do much for me.
It stands to mention I’m not much of a poetry reader, so please consider this review in light of that. Poetry reading is more of an experiment to me. One that seldom pays off, but still intrigues me in a way.
I like classic poetry, but modern one doesn’t seem to compare or even come closer. The juxtaposition is like a ball gown to athleisure wear. One has structure and beauty.

[Meesh · Rating 5 out of 5]

My husband introduced me to Kwame Dawes, sharing an extraordinary poem he’d stumbled upon in a New Yorker magazine. We read it over and over and spent a long time talking about its impact on us both, the spare beauty of the language, there was just so much to this single poem. I went searching the library and found this one book of poems: Nebraska. I don’t understand why his books aren’t more available. Perhaps people felt the way I did at first, that I wanted to hoard these poems, keep them at hand, read them again and again. In the end my husband was wise, he just bought a copy. I’m hoping he’ll share it. Nebraska is split into four parts, mirroring the seasons. Dawes poems are so resonant, so deeply personal, yet so completely universal and accessible- I kept going back and rereading poems I thought I’d finished with, each time discovering some new thing to explore. Now I want to read everything he’s written.

[Jordan Charlton · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful meditation on place and displacement.

[Nicole · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really loved this book. The combination of immigrant and native voice and how sometimes we are both things. As well as his use of color or lack thereof. Slow and deep moving.

[Lauren G. · Rating 3 out of 5]

“I am living in the blank gaps of feelings that settle over me like weather does in the late summer of Nebraska—the suggestion of harvest to come, the script in the air that natives can read, but I, not born to the farm, to the calculus of acreage, can only guess at. What I say here grows out of a restless exile.”

“I was not born to snowfall,
still, I have understood the metaphor of shelter
and how a man, walking into the evening after
a day in shadow, can be filled with something like hope
at the transformation that snow enacts—a painter
abandoning color for the shades of gray and light;
the simplicity of it all, and the grand silence.”

“Here the body creates a membrane
of such leathery resilience that it may
keep in all the wounds we have collected.”

[Kira Lewis]

I read this book because I saw Kwame Dawes at Dodge Poetry Festival, and I fell in love with his poetry there. And every poem I read in this book I heard in his voice. Hearing him talk was truly amazing.

The only words I can come up with to describe Dawes' writing style are "comforting" and "beautiful." He feels close to me, like a family member sharing a story.... This is not an adequate description so please read it and maybe you'll see what I mean!

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kwame Dawes’s “Nebraska: Poems” arrives with the modesty of a license plate slogan and the patience of weather. The book begins under the wry, disarming epigraph – “Honestly, it’s not for everyone” – and proceeds to behave as if it believes that line not as marketing but as a principle of form: no rush, no dazzle, no plea to be liked. Dawes, a poet with a long and various career, has written a collection that treats place not as scenery but as discipline, not as backdrop but as a pressure system. Nebraska is not an idea to be solved here; it is a set of conditions – light, flatness, distance, winter, the public silence that can feel like mercy and like threat – under which the self must keep speaking, or at least keep trying to speak without lying.

The title promises the familiar pleasures of regional writing – the hearty local detail, the pastoral lift, the affectionate inventory. Dawes offers something stranger and, in its way, more accurate: a portrait of a life conducted in the wide-open, in which openness is not freedom but exposure. The poems are alert to how a landscape can empty you out and how, in that emptied state, you begin to notice what you were too busy to hear elsewhere. This is a book that understands attention as an ethical act. It does not “make a case” so much as keep returning to the scene of perception, asking – with the steadiness of a person who knows the question will not be answered – what it means to witness without turning witness into performance.

The collection is divided into three sections – I, II, and III – a plain architecture that feels almost deliberately unliterary, as if Dawes is wary of giving the reader the comfort of an ornate map. The first section functions as an arrival narrative, but not the romantic kind. Arrival here is not a homecoming; it is a recalibration. In “How I Became an Apostle,” the voice introduces itself with a sly grandeur that is immediately undercut by the reality of daily life. An apostle, in these poems, is not a saint or a hero but a person tasked with carrying testimony in the most ordinary possible setting – an immigrant body in a Midwestern town, a mind trying to find language that does not flatter itself. “Advent” and its neighboring pieces feel tuned to beginnings – October light, first winter, the slow conversion of the body to cold. Dawes is good on the way the weather teaches you to live differently: how winter turns the simplest errands into negotiations, how it changes your sense of time, how it makes you measure yourself against endurance rather than ambition.

And yet the poems are never only meteorological. The weather is a method. It becomes a way of thinking about the conditions under which certain kinds of lives are lived and certain kinds of histories are preserved – or erased. In “The Immigrant Contemplates Death,” the immigrant consciousness is rendered not as a political category but as a private, incessant calculus: where one’s vulnerability sits in the body, how it changes from day to day, how it is mirrored by the landscape’s refusal of intimacy. Dawes resists the explanatory gestures that many readers have come to expect from poems about migration or racialized life. He does not annotate himself for a presumed audience. Instead, he gives you a speaker who is simply there, in the place, in the season, in the nation, and who must make a life from that fact without turning the fact into a lesson.

This refusal of the lecture is one of the book’s strengths and, depending on the reader, one of its frustrations. “Nebraska: Poems” is not built for extraction. Its best effects accrue. Dawes’s lines often move with a long-breathed syntax – sentence after sentence that seems to be thinking itself into being, accumulating clauses the way a mind accumulates its day: observation, doubt, memory, the sudden prickle of fear, then the effort to return to the ground of what can be said plainly. You can feel the poet’s preference for the unshowy phrase, the phrase that stays close to experience rather than vaulting toward metaphor. This is not a collection that hands you quotable aphorisms every few pages. It is a book that asks you to read at the pace of a person walking in winter, each step a small insistence.

If Section I is the book’s arrival, Section II is its widening – the moment when private perception begins to admit the full pressure of public life. The titles alone suggest a shift in weather: “The Epoch of Lies,” “In These Times,” “Sniper,” “July Fourth.” If the first section is attentive to the moral geometry of place, the second is attentive to the moral weather of a nation. Dawes does not date his poems with headlines, yet the atmosphere is unmistakably contemporary. We live, after all, in an era in which the public language is constantly being worn down – the slow corrosion of shared facts, the way repetition can turn a lie into furniture. “The Epoch of Lies” reads less like a political statement than like a description of the air one breathes – a recognition that falsity is no longer an event but a climate. Dawes’s gift is to show how a climate enters the body: how it changes your posture, your tone, your willingness to trust your own perceptions.

Here the collection brushes, quietly but unmistakably, against the present’s familiar anxieties: the fatigue of constant crisis, the way outrage can curdle into numbness, the difficulty of sustaining attention without burning out. Dawes does not write protest poems in the declarative mode; he writes poems in which the very act of speaking becomes fraught. The voice in these pages is alert to the way political language can become performative, how righteous urgency can start to resemble the very spectacle it claims to oppose. There is an implicit critique here, not of activism itself but of the contemporary temptation to mistake intensity for clarity. Dawes’s poems choose a different ethic – a slower one, a more precarious one – in which the work is not to proclaim but to keep seeing.

In “Sniper,” violence appears not as a singular shock but as an ambient possibility, one more element in the emotional landscape. The word carries its own contemporary dread, and Dawes uses that dread sparingly, refusing sensationalism. The effect is more chilling than a dramatic scene would be. It resembles the way gun violence has been metabolized in American life – a constant background threat that shapes behavior even when it does not manifest. “July Fourth,” too, is a poem that understands ritual as a kind of national self-hypnosis. In recent years, the country’s celebrations have become sites of dispute, grief, and competing narratives. Dawes’s poem does not argue; it observes the tension between the nation’s story and the nation’s reality, the way fireworks can look like beauty and sound like warning depending on what your body has learned to fear.

If these concerns call to mind Claudia Rankine’s “Citizen” or Natasha Trethewey’s “Native Guard,” it is not because Dawes is writing in the same mode. Rankine’s work is famously sharp, a knife of form. Trethewey’s is elegiac, historically granular. Dawes is doing something quieter and, in its way, riskier: he is writing into the space where the political is not a subject but a condition. His poems do not frame themselves as interventions. They frame themselves as lived time. In this, “Nebraska: Poems” resembles a book like Tracy K. Smith’s “Life on Mars” in its sense that the personal and the public are braided at the level of perception – or Ada Limón’s “The Carrying,” with its emphasis on the body’s intimate reckonings. There is also an older lineage hovering behind Dawes’s plain speaking: William Stafford’s Midwestern patience, Elizabeth Bishop’s exacting attention, even Charles Reznikoff’s “Testimony” in its commitment to witnessing without adornment. Dawes, however, has his own cadence, a voice that often feels like it is refusing to be a voice – refusing to become a brand.

Section III turns inward again, but not as retreat. It is the book’s bodily reckoning – the place where attention is tested by fragility. “On Blindness,” “Insomniac,” “Transplant,” “Surviving, Again,” “Ambulation,” “On Picking Battles,” “Before Winter” – these titles read like a chart of endurance. The body in this section is not romanticized. It is not made heroic. It is simply present, with its betrayals and its limits. In a cultural moment saturated with narratives of resilience – the tidy arc from suffering to redemption – Dawes’s refusal of triumph feels bracing. He does not allow illness to become instructive. He does not allow survival to become virtue. He describes what it is like to live in the aftermath of bodily certainty, when time is no longer a clean line but a series of repetitions: sleepless nights, slow walks, the careful management of energy, the dull knowledge that some things do not improve but only become familiar.

There is a poem late in the book, “Before Winter,” that functions as a kind of coda, and it is here that Dawes’s long-line method comes fully into view. The poem moves with the pace of a mind trying to keep hold of itself in the face of fatigue, letting images arrive – backyard light, a dog pausing, the sky’s watery blue – and then letting them open onto the larger anxieties that cling to any quiet moment: “the betrayals of body and love and earth,” the machinations of power, the knowledge that winter will come. The poem does not resolve these pressures. It gathers them. It suggests, without stating, that gathering may be the only honest form of consolation available – not the false comfort of a lesson, but the real comfort of having named what is there.

This is the book’s essential method: it does not save you; it stays with you. In an era when our attention is constantly being monetized and shattered, when the self is asked to perform its feelings on demand, Dawes offers a collection that is almost aggressively unoptimized. It is not built for virality. It is built for rereading. That is a compliment, but it is also a note of warning. Readers who want compression, who want the quick electrical pleasure of lyric brilliance, may find themselves restless. Even sympathetic readers may feel the collection’s mood settle into a sameness. Dawes’s restraint, admirable as it is, sometimes risks flattening his emotional range. There are moments when the long line begins to feel like a habit rather than an inevitability – when you sense the poem could have benefited from a sharper turn, a more surprising formal risk, a willingness to let silence do more of the work.

And yet the very steadiness that can read as monotony is also what gives the collection its moral weight. “Nebraska: Poems” is, among other things, a book about limits – the limits of the body, the limits of language, the limits of empathy, the limits of how much public catastrophe one can metabolize without breaking. “On Picking Battles” names, in its title alone, a contemporary condition: moral decision fatigue, the daily triage required to remain ethically awake in a world that constantly demands reaction. Dawes’s poems do not pretend that the self can be infinitely responsive. They suggest that a sustainable ethics may look less like constant outrage and more like disciplined attention – the decision to keep looking, even when looking does not lead to action or relief.

If the book has a flaw, it is that its virtues are sometimes too consistent. Dawes’s refusal of spectacle, his avoidance of rhetorical fireworks, his ethical modesty – these qualities create a collection that is deeply trustworthy and, at times, slightly underpowered. One wishes, occasionally, for a moment of formal rupture, a poem that risks ugliness or strangeness, something that would break the book’s careful poise and remind us that witness can also be violent, that the mind under pressure does not always speak in measured cadences. The book is so committed to its own discipline that it sometimes feels as though it is holding something back – not in the sense of withholding truth, but in the sense of refusing emotional extremity even when extremity might be warranted.

Still, to read “Nebraska: Poems” is to encounter a writer who understands that the truest drama may be the drama of continuance. Dawes’s Nebraska is a place of wide skies and long distances, yes, but it is also a place where the self learns to live inside time’s repetitive demands. The book’s politics are not slogans but atmospheres; its ethics are not declarations but practices. It belongs in conversation with the contemporary works that have tried to render the psychic cost of living now – the erosion of truth, the normalization of violence, the exhaustion of constant crisis – but it does so with an insistence on slowness that feels almost contrarian. It asks the reader to accept that there may be no catharsis, no epiphany, only the daily work of attention.

In that sense, “Nebraska: Poems” is a book that meets the moment by refusing to mimic it. Our era rewards speed, certainty, performance. Dawes offers duration, doubt, restraint. The effect is not always dazzling, but it is often profound. The collection’s best poems do not announce themselves as best; they stay in the mind like weather – a pressure you notice only when you step outside and realize you have been living under it all along.

If I were assigning it a number, the book lands at 81 out of 100: a serious, admirable collection whose cumulative power is undeniable, even if it sometimes resists the sharper pleasures – compression, surprise, lyrical peak – that would push it from accomplished to undeniable. What it lacks in immediacy it makes up for in integrity. It is a book that does not beg for devotion, but it rewards it – slowly, stubbornly, like winter light on a flat horizon.

[Becca · Rating 3 out of 5]

With a few exceptions, this collection of poems is not my cup of tea.

The vibe I get is: poems written for other academic poets. I will grant that once I started sensing that about a third of the way through, it affected how I read the rest.

[Stephanie Glass · Rating 4 out of 5]

The epigraph for the collection is the Nebraska motto, "Honestly, it's not for everyone" -- Kwame Dawes derives a new meaning from this phrase, examining his place in Nebraska through the lens of his race and ethnicity, it calls the humor of the line into question and finds a more serious investigation of the line. His focus on the whiteness of the snow--to the point where the winter section feels nearly eternal-- calls more than just the landscape into view.

Throughout this collection, the author preforms a meditation on blindness and silence. The line in the final poem, Before Winter, "I mean I am losing myself to the shelter we build to/ beat back / sorrow and the weight of our fears." seems to sum up a large portion of the themes of the text.

Dawes seems to be in perpetual conflict with the landscape of Nebraska, finding it both unforgiving, and then in the later segment of the collection, softening towards the beauty he sees--yet fearing the impact of his own comfort.

Beautifully written, "The Chronicler of Sorrows" and "Novela" are my favorites. This work deserves further contemplation.

[E. · Rating 4 out of 5]

"This is my dream: that my
words may be a grand infection
turning and turning in a bare
studio, our bodies electrified
to passions each time we walk
across a ribbon of imagination;
a kind of holy beauty consuming body."

These poems are beautiful, and while I recommend them for any poetry reader, every Nebraskan ought to have this volume in their collection. Nebraska has such a rich literature and this volume adds to that legacy, while providing a new perspective. Nebraska is approached with humor and a skepticism that also grows into affection, if not a full embrace.

"Were I better at this, I would study almanacs,
chart the seasons, visit Ted Kooser on his farm
in midwinter, without invitation, and carry
his two-by-fours and barbwire rolls to the edge
of his land, and ask him the names of the birds
turning in the sky, or the yield of the corn crop,
or the number of people he has buried--farm people,
his people."

[Kaitlin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Outside of a handful of poems and some really fantastic one liners, this collection is not my preference stylistically.

My favorites poems included:
-Novela
-On History
-Purple
-The Chronicle of Sorrows

————————————
“I have not grown silent, friend, I have merely sealed all the noise in my head.”

“. . . where a heartbroken man tortures himself by not killing himself, . .”

[J.L. Thornton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some really beautiful language and imagery here, with emotion that feels raw and authentic. My only issue is that it began to feel repetitive in themes and language in a way that sort of blurred the whole thing together and made me less interested in continuing. Still a fascinating perspective and lovely style overall.

[Justin · Rating 2 out of 5]

To Dawes, Nebraska is just an adjective — one to add to quite a generous list of them. Disappointing that none of the stark, spartan beauty of the state and little of the contradictory quality of its people found its way into his poems (or any other deeper locale).

[Robert Mayer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think a 4.75 out of 5 would work better, but this is as strong of a collection of poetry I have read in a long time. Dawes does an incredible job of pulling the reader into a scene or an image and then extracting the potential meaning -- all the while using powerful wordplay.

[Saddiq Dzukogi · Rating 5 out of 5]

By far the best poetry collection I read in 2019!!!

[Clay Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really strong poetry collection.

[Bill · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this is an important book of poetry.

[Heidi Goehmann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gifted descriptive writings. I enjoyed this insightful and vulnerable look at a life between places, between homes, making room for a new place you may not have envisioned yourself in.

[Arlene · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed this. An interesting collection of poems reflecting on home, memory and conflict.

[Tyler · Rating 3 out of 5]

Poems with some substance, interesting turns of phrase, etc. And some of them are very good. But most are a little redundant—and the volume as whole, a bit bloated.

[Maddie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I did not expect poetry to have such a significant role in my postpartum experience. This collection was inspiring.

[kaitlynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

i had the wonderful pleasure of getting to meet kwame dawes and listen to him closely. this was my favorite selection i read for class.

[Joe Kennedy · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The body in this state of morendo is being guided in it's sorrows and mourning by the filter of a feed -
who is feeding us, what are they feeding us? Such a diet of controlled attention."