Desert Center - Paperback

by Miles Waggener (Author)

Desert Center embraces the complexities of the particular in place and person, from the deserts of the Southwest to his current home territory in Nebraska. Indeed, Waggener's heartland is wherever his poetic visions land, regardless if they are open, spare places or urban streets; they explore, as well, so wonderfully the characters who populate such territory, unnoticed people whose presence can only command notice from a poet such as Waggener.

As Jim Simmerman has noted about Phoenix Suites (2003), an earlier book, Waggener's poems "never steer the easy streets of sentimentality and irony." Rather, he finds in the blank slate of his physical and intellectual regions matters of beauty, strange yet familiar, and brings them to resonate for us all. Though Waggener is a recent arrival to the Great Plains--and specifically Nebraska letters--he is sure to be one of a number of contemporary voices to set the course for the region's next generation of writers and poets, joining the company of such people as Kooser, Kloefkorn, Shapiro, Welch, Kosmicki as that path is laid.

Author Biography

MILES WAGGENER is the author of two previous poetry collections: Phoenix Suites (The Word Works, 2003), winner of the Washington Prize; and Sky Harbor (Pinyon Publishing, 2011); as well as the chapbooks Portents Aside (Two Dogs Press, 2008); Afterlives (Finishing Line, 2013); The Jeremiads (Slowed Soul, 2017); and Arterial Roads (Open Country Press, 2017). He lives in Omaha, Nebraska, where he coordinates the Writer's Workshop at The University of Nebraska Omaha.