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Gerson’s country, a landscape haunted by echoes of the past, by wind and absence, is brought to vivid life by the stark, lean poems of Once Planed Straight. His work captures a time and place that many might overlook or dismiss, whether of small-town diners, rock bluffs, or abandoned barns. With authenticity as well as poignant humanity, Steve Gerson observes moments of quiet, ghostly beauty, a post oak corral/fencing memories or the muffled breeze of a distant hummingbird’s wings on a slight promontory of prairie grass.
-Tom Reynolds, author of Ghost Town Almanac
and Home Field, Woodley Press.
Once Planed Straight reminds us that the heart and soul of the American dream thrived not so long ago in the small towns and farms fast disappearing from our Midwest landscape. These evocative poems give us a nuanced and often heartbreaking glimpse into what we’ve left behind.
-Edie Cottrell Kreisler, Professor Emeritus, Merritt College
Steve Gerson’s poetry collection locates readers in a place of absence and silence and then gifts them the moon and purple prairie clover. The poetry in this book contains the subtlety and complexity of a sunset on the Flint Hills. Gerson has divided the book into sections, rooting readers in place first and leading them to love in the end. He reminds us that when we lose our aspirations and our sense of place, there is still something left to love. Once Planed Straight woos readers with evocative sensory images and alliteration. In the end, readers are left with the sense that Gerson has gifted [them] the morning mist.
-Beth Gulley, author of I Am Your Fish Drowning
In Air: Love Poems, The Sticky Note Alphabet,
and $!*# Hole Countries: A Find and Replace
Meditation.
Striking images of nature, coupled with the hauntingremnants of old grain silos, dilapidated barns, and wirefences, provide readers a notion of a pioneer spirit long departed, even as the land continues to evolve unabated.
-Jim McWard, Ph.D., Professor, English, Johnson
County Community College
