The Ahsahta Anthology

Dale Boyer, Orvis Burmaster, and Tom Trusky, eds.

Casual readers as well as serious students of Western art and writing will enjoy this anthology, culled from the editors’ work with Ahsahta’s Modern and Contemporary Poets of the American West series. From their reintroduction of several turn-of-the-century poets to the contemporary poem that inspired Sheryl Crow’s Grammy-winning single “All I Wanna Do,” the forty-six poets represented constitute the heart and heartbeat of Western writing. Here, nuclear physicists, cowhands, Chief Joseph, and Montana smoke-jumpers are side by side with winners of the Pulitzer Prize, the Yale Younger Poet award, Guggenheim and NEA grants, and other accolades. What all have in common, as Wallace Stegner phrased it, is the “geography of hope” that is the American West.

A sample poem from the book

Probably She Is a River

Gretel Ehrlich

Probably she is a river where

seasonal mixtures run

rich: watercress, hot springs, ice floes stacked

in clerical collars on robes of

dark water folding and

unfolding around her.

Probably she lost track

of her reflection in the armed ambush

of willow stands.

She will not say her name.

Here is where

all the collisions of storms

fall out and swim home.

She rides those

hard boxcars with other

hoboes of winter: snowdrift, comet tail,

wounded deer.

Here, at the rapids,

she navigates her thin hips into surrenders.

Those strangers hunt and

touch and drink her longing to be invisible.

They do not fatten on it.

She loves them so she wants

to be their one predator.

They love her so they want her

wildness to be hunted in them.

They tow her on

thin train-floats of driftwood

into warm spots and out again past

bullet holes of rocks.

All her waters and liquors pulled this way.

Probably she cries out,

“I'm sinking.”

Despite this vanity,

the river opens and accepts.

She is the water that carries her.