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Reading Colorado
Take a drive into the literary landscapes of Colorado. Meet Kent Haruf's bachelor farmers in the Eastern Plains, ford the South Platte with Mark Twain, rail against nuclear weapons with Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsberg, hitch a ride to Denver with Jack Kerouac, climb the highest peaks with Isabella Bird and Enos Mills, explore the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde with Willa Cather.
Reading Colorado , a high-octane road trip through the diverse literary landscapes of the Centennial State, gathers narratives of exploration, stories from the mining and agricultural frontiers, urban tales reflecting the emergence and growth of Denver and the Front Range, and a diverse range of contemporary voices, from the Plains to the Peaks, who invite readers into their home territory.
The travel guide format is perfect for exploring Colorado in a hammock strung between some aspens, on the couch with your feet kicked up by the fire, or by hitting the road with your favorite traveling companion. This guide includes many writers not yet anthologized as well as others who have become household names and its place-based focus makes it easy to zoom in on literature that features your favorite locations. It will deepen the map, enhancing road trips for residents, visitors, and armchair travelers alike.
Reading Colorado , a high-octane road trip through the diverse literary landscapes of the Centennial State, gathers narratives of exploration, stories from the mining and agricultural frontiers, urban tales reflecting the emergence and growth of Denver and the Front Range, and a diverse range of contemporary voices, from the Plains to the Peaks, who invite readers into their home territory.
The travel guide format is perfect for exploring Colorado in a hammock strung between some aspens, on the couch with your feet kicked up by the fire, or by hitting the road with your favorite traveling companion. This guide includes many writers not yet anthologized as well as others who have become household names and its place-based focus makes it easy to zoom in on literature that features your favorite locations. It will deepen the map, enhancing road trips for residents, visitors, and armchair travelers alike.
456 pages, Paperback
Published May 15, 2023
17 people are currently reading
97 people want to read
About the author
Peter Anderson
4 books1 followerPeter Anderson’s most recent book is Reading Colorado: A Literary Road Guide. Other books include Heading Home: Field Notes, a collection of flash prose and prose poems exploring rural life and the modern day eccentricities of the American West and First Church of the Higher Elevations, a collection of essays on wildness, mountains, and the life of the spirit. He lives with his family on the western slope of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in southern Colorado where he launched the Crestone Poetry Festival, an annual gathering of southwestern poets.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
September 26, 2023
Love love love this! So well organized, with each chapter numbered and a map that corresponds to each number to refer back to. My 83 year old MIL needed something to read and ended up spending the entire day reading this book. An absolute must for fans of CO literature...
August 12, 2023
This is a great overview of the state. I have lived here 40 plus years and I learned many things that
would give a newcomer to Colorado a great background. I liked the short entries on many topics. It is easy to skim over areas you aren't interested in but surprised by many excerpts that I would like to read more about. I had previously read at least 10 books included in this anthology.
would give a newcomer to Colorado a great background. I liked the short entries on many topics. It is easy to skim over areas you aren't interested in but surprised by many excerpts that I would like to read more about. I had previously read at least 10 books included in this anthology.
December 27, 2025
Thirty-five hundred miles and a few months later, I came home with folders full of maps, brochures, and many pages of copied excerpts for this book, not to mention lots of snapshot-sized memories, or "neurochromes," of various scenes along the way-shooting stars over Gore Pass, nighthawks at dusk along the Green River in Brown's Park, a high plains dome of blue sky over Baca County. I have heard Colorado described as "the land of the long look." Driving south over Poncha Pass, that seemed about right as the great expanse of the San Luis Valley welcomed me home.
Its loneliness stretched my soul. There was nothing in sight on the open prairie. The high clear air shimmered with moonlight. The silence deepened into a sound of itself, a palpable atmosphere through which we walked to what In this unpeopled place what destination could there be? An intensely felt but not understood part of me was being stretched in every direction to the circular horizon and upward to that immense field of stars. I was aware of my hunger then, a hunger that stirred me to living life, a knowledge that I was more than myself, that self of the hours of day and night, that the unknown answer lay all about me, that everything spoke to me and yet I could not understand. Sanora Babb
Fantastic collection of writing about Colorado, although the fiction pieces were generally less powerful than poetry or nonfiction pieces. To be able to find something for all the diverse areas of Colorado is a feat! A great book for a Colorado lover’s library to be revisited and savor. I was happy by the inclusion of so many female voices, but there was a lack of indigenous voices, unfortunately, unsure why, if they weren't widely available or have been erased.
In October of 1879, poet Walt Whitman boarded a westbound train out of Denver. The Denver, South Park and Pacific route entered the mountains by way of Platte Canyon, following the North Fork of the South Platte River up to the spine of the Front Range. The tracks, which were still under construction in South Park, ran only as far as 10,000-foot Kenosha Pass. Because the sixty-year-old poet had some health concerns, he was reluctant to embark on a horse-drawn journey over 13,185 foot Mosquito Pass to Leadville. Although he had previously thought he might like to visit Leadville, Kenosha Pass was as far as he got-far enough, as it turned out, to inspire some poetic reflections.
The ride up the canyon made a big impression, which he recorded in a letter. "I have found the law of my own poems amid all this grim yet joyous elemental abandon-this plentitude of material, entire absence of art, untrammel'd play of primitive Nature-the chasm, the gorge, the crystal mountain stream ... the fantastic forms, bathed in transparent browns, faint reds and grays, towering sometimes a thousand, sometimes two or three thousand feet high-at their tops now and then huge masses pois'd, and mixing with the clouds, with only their outlines, hazed in the misty lilac, visible."
From the summit at Kenosha he witnessed the "paradisiac loveliness" of South Park, surrounded by mountain peaks "in every variety of perspective, every hue of vista, [which] fringe the view." Further reflection on the spiritual dimension of his travels lowing poem.
Spirit that formed this scene
These tumbled rock-piles grim and red,
These reckless heaven-ambitious peaks,
These gorges, turbulent-clear streams, this naked freshness,
These formless wild arrays, for reasons of their own;
I know thee, savage spirit-we have communed together,
Mine too such wild arrays, for reasons of their own;
Was't charged against my chants they had forgotten art?
To fuse within themselves its rules precise and delicatesse?
The lyrist's measur'd beat, the wrought-out temple's grace-
column and polish'd arch forgot?
But thou that revelest here-spirit that form'd this scene,
They have remember'd thee.
The prehistoric people who inhabited the Green and Yampa canyons, and who belonged to the cultural complex known to archaeologists as the Fremont Culture, [were] a branch of the prehistoric Pueblo-Basketmaker group, or Anasazi ... . The pictographs and petroglyphs which they painted in red ocher or chipped with sharp stones in the faces of the cliffs mark the northernmost extension of the Anasazi Culture .... These murals, together with the terrace camp sites and middens and the many storage granaries in caves, are among the earliest human marks in the area. To us, the most immediately fascinating of the relics the Fremont people left are these pictures, which record the game they hunted, the ceremonial objects they revered, the idle doodling dreams they indulged in, and-most wistful and most human of all-the painted handprints and footprints, the personal tracks, that said, and still say: "I am." Wallace Stegner
Over the Great Divide unrolls the highway
And cars go wagging their tails among the thunders,
Range to range stitching, weather to weather.
In half a day you can hem up the watershed
And rush on the prairie or race on the desert again
Unaware of the infinite clues of legend,
The featherstitching of roads that thread the meadows,
Follow the gulches, follow the mountain pattern.
…
Only the wind,
The long, the diamond wind disturbs that water.
“Goldboat" by Belle Turnbull
Its loneliness stretched my soul. There was nothing in sight on the open prairie. The high clear air shimmered with moonlight. The silence deepened into a sound of itself, a palpable atmosphere through which we walked to what In this unpeopled place what destination could there be? An intensely felt but not understood part of me was being stretched in every direction to the circular horizon and upward to that immense field of stars. I was aware of my hunger then, a hunger that stirred me to living life, a knowledge that I was more than myself, that self of the hours of day and night, that the unknown answer lay all about me, that everything spoke to me and yet I could not understand. Sanora Babb
Fantastic collection of writing about Colorado, although the fiction pieces were generally less powerful than poetry or nonfiction pieces. To be able to find something for all the diverse areas of Colorado is a feat! A great book for a Colorado lover’s library to be revisited and savor. I was happy by the inclusion of so many female voices, but there was a lack of indigenous voices, unfortunately, unsure why, if they weren't widely available or have been erased.
In October of 1879, poet Walt Whitman boarded a westbound train out of Denver. The Denver, South Park and Pacific route entered the mountains by way of Platte Canyon, following the North Fork of the South Platte River up to the spine of the Front Range. The tracks, which were still under construction in South Park, ran only as far as 10,000-foot Kenosha Pass. Because the sixty-year-old poet had some health concerns, he was reluctant to embark on a horse-drawn journey over 13,185 foot Mosquito Pass to Leadville. Although he had previously thought he might like to visit Leadville, Kenosha Pass was as far as he got-far enough, as it turned out, to inspire some poetic reflections.
The ride up the canyon made a big impression, which he recorded in a letter. "I have found the law of my own poems amid all this grim yet joyous elemental abandon-this plentitude of material, entire absence of art, untrammel'd play of primitive Nature-the chasm, the gorge, the crystal mountain stream ... the fantastic forms, bathed in transparent browns, faint reds and grays, towering sometimes a thousand, sometimes two or three thousand feet high-at their tops now and then huge masses pois'd, and mixing with the clouds, with only their outlines, hazed in the misty lilac, visible."
From the summit at Kenosha he witnessed the "paradisiac loveliness" of South Park, surrounded by mountain peaks "in every variety of perspective, every hue of vista, [which] fringe the view." Further reflection on the spiritual dimension of his travels lowing poem.
Spirit that formed this scene
These tumbled rock-piles grim and red,
These reckless heaven-ambitious peaks,
These gorges, turbulent-clear streams, this naked freshness,
These formless wild arrays, for reasons of their own;
I know thee, savage spirit-we have communed together,
Mine too such wild arrays, for reasons of their own;
Was't charged against my chants they had forgotten art?
To fuse within themselves its rules precise and delicatesse?
The lyrist's measur'd beat, the wrought-out temple's grace-
column and polish'd arch forgot?
But thou that revelest here-spirit that form'd this scene,
They have remember'd thee.
The prehistoric people who inhabited the Green and Yampa canyons, and who belonged to the cultural complex known to archaeologists as the Fremont Culture, [were] a branch of the prehistoric Pueblo-Basketmaker group, or Anasazi ... . The pictographs and petroglyphs which they painted in red ocher or chipped with sharp stones in the faces of the cliffs mark the northernmost extension of the Anasazi Culture .... These murals, together with the terrace camp sites and middens and the many storage granaries in caves, are among the earliest human marks in the area. To us, the most immediately fascinating of the relics the Fremont people left are these pictures, which record the game they hunted, the ceremonial objects they revered, the idle doodling dreams they indulged in, and-most wistful and most human of all-the painted handprints and footprints, the personal tracks, that said, and still say: "I am." Wallace Stegner
Over the Great Divide unrolls the highway
And cars go wagging their tails among the thunders,
Range to range stitching, weather to weather.
In half a day you can hem up the watershed
And rush on the prairie or race on the desert again
Unaware of the infinite clues of legend,
The featherstitching of roads that thread the meadows,
Follow the gulches, follow the mountain pattern.
…
Only the wind,
The long, the diamond wind disturbs that water.
“Goldboat" by Belle Turnbull
August 5, 2023
This book is such a great collection of Colorado voices, and I love how it is organized highway by highway along a road trip map. Anderson does such a good job laying these voices and stories over the map and engaging these huge and regional voices in conversation with one another.
May 2, 2024
In "Reading Colorado: A Literary Road Guide," editor Peter Anderson collects excerpts from literary works that feature diverse locales in the colorful state of Colorado. Anderson loves the rich history, culture, and people of various Colorado cities and towns.
The volume features a diverse slate of writers and writings, from Ursula Leguin's ponderings to Hunter S. Thompson's campaign manifesto to Louis L'Amour's western U.S. fiction. Anderson takes great care of providing context for each piece of writing to offer the reader the necessary background about the featured author's connection to Colorado.
Context is especially helpful for readers who may not have direct experience with various far-flung Colorado locations. While he features the voices of a plethora of writers, Anderson makes this book his very own through contextual introductions of how authors highlighted Colorado in their writing.
I appreciated Anderson’s explanation of his process for collecting the literary materials. In “Acknowledgments” he was transparent about early imaginings and collaborators about the project. His fascination with maps is palpable and infectious. Beyond fiction and non-fiction, Anderson ensured that Hispano, Indigenous, women and other voices are celebrated to show the diversity of this great state.
The volume features a diverse slate of writers and writings, from Ursula Leguin's ponderings to Hunter S. Thompson's campaign manifesto to Louis L'Amour's western U.S. fiction. Anderson takes great care of providing context for each piece of writing to offer the reader the necessary background about the featured author's connection to Colorado.
Context is especially helpful for readers who may not have direct experience with various far-flung Colorado locations. While he features the voices of a plethora of writers, Anderson makes this book his very own through contextual introductions of how authors highlighted Colorado in their writing.
I appreciated Anderson’s explanation of his process for collecting the literary materials. In “Acknowledgments” he was transparent about early imaginings and collaborators about the project. His fascination with maps is palpable and infectious. Beyond fiction and non-fiction, Anderson ensured that Hispano, Indigenous, women and other voices are celebrated to show the diversity of this great state.
January 2, 2024
Packaged as short stories from every part of Colorado from a variety of authors, this is a great way to get to know the diversity that makes up this state. Love the map which corresponds to the stories to know where these places exist!
July 21, 2024
Loved the structure of this book linking not just CO authors to CO locations, but also other writers who have journeyed to our state and shown their appreciation on the page!
August 28, 2024
THIS BOOK! Coloradoans (and anyone who loves the area): This book is a MUST! Love love love it!
Want to read
October 9, 2024recommended by drew and kathy
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 8, 2024
3.5 Stars
August 17, 2025
This was just too boring. I read almost 200 pages, but I absolutely could not make it through. So curious to find out if anyone else in my book club actually finished this!
September 16, 2025
The best of the best compiled in a beautiful anthology.
December 9, 2025
5 mostly because it's a really cool concept to have a roadside guide to literature.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews