As they provide us with various versions of a history of their place, these poems resound with the rumble of boxcars, the slap of the river currents against the steel hulls of barges, the clatter of cicadas above the whisper of bluestem grass, the quiet voices of grandfather, father and son across the generations, and their dialogues with grandmother, mother, daughter.

Here, from the graves and ashes of the sodbusters, riverboat crews, and railroadmen who populated these vast midland spaces, their themes of angry disillusion, terror in the face of overpowering elemental forces, and ironic resignation to tragic destiny, come to us in language as unmistakable as smoke or dust on the ineluctable prairie wind.

The forms of Thomas Reiter’s poems, their rhythms and language, deliver an unerring sense of history’s inevitabilities, asking us to witness the bleak lives of the family captured on the photographer’s plate in 1874, and the pensioned railroad carpenter’s fate, and the peripeteia of the class bully, first of us to die.

Every version of Thomas Rieter’s Midwest history-social, natural, economic, personal-derives its authority from the extraordinary wealth of sharply observed, sensuous, detailed imagery, which alerts even the casual reader to the significance of what these various voices, given a choral unity by the poet’s art, are saying to us.