This title is printed to order. This book may have been self-published. If so, we cannot guarantee the quality of the content. In the main most books will have gone through the editing process however some may not. We therefore suggest that you be aware of this before ordering this book. If in doubt check either the author or publisher’s details as we are unable to accept any returns unless they are faulty. Please contact us if you have any questions.
I once included Harley Elliott in a group I referred to as
Poets of the 6th Principle Meridian (the north-south line
used as a base for the Public Land Survey System that laid
out the hatch-work of green and brown quadrangles we see
as we fly over heartland America). He has lived for many
years within a stone’s throw of that meridian and his poems
often speak as straight as a section-line road about the beating
hearts of prairie denizens. The forms of the poems on the
pages of Creature Way put me in mind of that characterization;
short line lengths make the poems on their pages into graphic
depictions of prairie perspectives; apparently simple words
put together in what appear to be simple ways are revealed
by attentive reading to express insightful truths as inter-
twined and intense as the tillering subsurface webs that
sustain prairie grasses through drought and fire and flood.
You owe yourself this conversation with Harley Elliott.
-Roy Beckemeyer, Author of Mouth Brimming Over (Blue Cedar Press, 2019)
Few poets can meditate on a prairie scene (or any scene)
with Harley’s wicked, intelligent wit. For instance, when
climbing through a barbwire fence following a lovely woman,
Harley writes, If she turns and / parts the wires for you /
call the preacher. That’s all Harley: voice and smarts and
humility and romance, all at once.
-Kevin Rabas (Poet Laureate of Kansas, 2017-
2019), All That Jazz
Harley Elliott is a homespun philosopher with a gifted earand the heart of a laughing scavenger.
-Steven Hind
Harley Elliott is the poet who made me want to be a poet.
His new book of revelations, Creature Way, continues to
interrogate the relationship between humans and other
living beings–including stones. The poem Turquoise
asserts, Some say it looks like sky. / Some say it is sky.
Artifice collapses. This is an essential book about the cosmos
from the poet who changed my life.
-Denise Low, Kansas Poet Laureate
