LM // Iowa – Travis Nichols
$12.00
Description
Iowa
BY TRAVIS NICHOLS
ABOUT IOWA
In Iowa, Travis Nichols turns the bleak cultural void of Midwestern adolescence into a sequence of stunning prose vignettes. Here, a coming-of-age consciousness articulates the knotty uncertainties of personal, social and familial anxieties in sentences as equally complex as the feelings they house: “The memories true or not against him seem to be turning to steam, as I turned, all the while thinking of chewing out alone through the ghostly meats.” With youthful perplexity and zeal, a humorous and caustic violence of reflection drives this meditative, unclassifiable book. The scary truth is that the foreignness of private teenage cant was always asking the right questions. Now, we just have to listen: “Is this the right one thing you haunt? Looking at this one house year after year? Yes. It must be. Not to let you move on. That was the way out.”
About the Author
Travis Nichols is a journalist, activist, novelist, and poet.
He’s published two novels with Coffee House Press — Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder, 2010 and The More You Ignore Me, 2014 — as well as two collections of poetry, See Me Improving, Copper Canyon Press, 2011, and Iowa. Letter Machine Editions, 2010. With Katie Geha, he curated the exhibition and edited the catalog for Poets on Painters, Wichita State University Press, 2008, which featured poets such as Dorothea Lasky, Hoa Nguyen, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, and Anselm Berrigan writing in response to paintings from Dana Schutz, Amy Sillman, Monique Prieto, and more.
With Lauren Groff and Nicole Sands, he co-edited the Greenpeace Climate Visionaries project, which featured Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Emily Raboteau, Leni Zumas, Min Jin Lee, Nathaniel Rich, R.O. Kwon, Jenny Offill, Karen, Russell, Kaitlyn Greenridge, and others. And with activist Jonathan Butler, he edited the “Poetry & Environmental Justice” feature for the Poetry Society of America, featuring Ada Limón, Kazim Ali, Craig Santos Perez, and other poets discussing how various poems inform their thinking about the climate crisis.
He currently lives in Marietta, Georgia and is the Director of Content Strategy for the international humanitarian organization CARE.org and editor of the award-winning CARE News & Stories.
In 2006 he was “tour manager” of the Wave Books Poetry Bus.