Kansas Poems

Kansas Poems "is a poetry of place and microhistory, which nonetheless transcends the people and events it tells about . . . And while I've never been to Kansas, I now feel that I might have-or at least that there is a Kansas of my mind, a place of lakes and fireflies and small lives." --Laura Chalar, author of Unlearning and Midnight at the Law Firm (Stories)

Brian Daldorph's eighth full-length collection of poetry is a tribute to his adopted state, where he has lived through the four seasons year by year, in Lawrence, Kansas.

Kansas poetry blooms in these pages, not only poems set in Lawrence, Linwood, Garden City, and Coffeyville, but also in the more mythological locations of Stony Creek Cemetery, Brook Creek Park, Oak Hill Cemetery and Stull, which, legend has it, is one of the gates of Hell. 

These are poems about Kansas people: a Vietnam vet still angry at the government who betrayed him; undertaker Zeke Haskins, looking out of his office window at his dying small town. The football coach's wife who fears that her husband will recruit their sons for the sport he loves.

There are ghost stories here, jail visits, love stories and breakups, a Kansas story about Brown Recluse spiders and Black Widows "waiting in outhouses and dreams with that one bite/ to freeze your limbs and jam your lungs . . ."