Finding Token Creek: New & Selected Writing, 19752020

“This beautiful collection of new and selected writings from Robert Alexander’s rich career as poet, editor, scholar and critic, covers a lot of territory. And that territory is better understood as something more deep than wide, something as much below the surface as above, whether the setting is a lake in Wisconsin or a hotel room in Richmond. A master of the prose poem, that hybrid form born at the crossroads of story and poem, a place where sacred meets profane, Alexander is a lover of the natural world and the human condition, the poems as full of yearning, puzzled people as they are of birds in flight, watching the author with the same intensity that he watches them from his canoe drifting close to shore. There is an uncanny stillness, a hush at the heart of the poems that is nearly palpable. “Here, at last, is a world you can learn to call your own” (“Now the Lake Is Empty”).” —Holly Iglesias, author of Boxing Inside the Box: Women’s Prose Poetry “In this rich retrospective of subtly artful and distinctively American prose poems, Robert Alexander discovers sufficiency and even the marvelous in the given, presented to us with affection and clarity. In several of the compressed narratives in which he appears as his Thoreauvian alter ego Ralph, the rugged landscape of Upper Peninsula Michigan itself becomes a beloved central character. Alexander understands, just as Martin Buber said, that all true living is encounter. In these poems encounters abound, not only with the human and nonhuman but in one eerily timely poem a monument to "Calhoun the Nullifier" in the South. In its humane sympathies and breadth, Finding Token Creek beckons the reader with its promise, "Here, at last, is a world you can learn to call your own.”" —Thomas R. Smith, author of Windy Day at Kabekona: New and Selected Prose Poems