Times Beach

Winner of the Notre Dame Review Book Prize, this ambitious collection of poems evokes the cultural and environmental history of the Mississippi watershed and meditates on how its rivers are ceaselessly shaping, and shaped by, the lives around them. John Shoptaw guides us from the Mississippi’s headwaters in Lake Itasca to its delta in the Gulf of Mexico, weaving together episodes in the life of the river system—the New Madrid earthquakes, the 1927 flood, the EPA’s eradication of the dioxin-laced town of Times Beach—with his own memories of growing up in the Missouri Bootheel: picking cotton, being baptized in a drainage ditch, and working in a lumber mill. Formally renovative, the poems in Times Beach ring the changes on the big muddy place and hymn its everlasting possibilities.