FINISHING LINE PRESS BOOK OF THE DAY:
A Ranch Bordering the Salty River by Stephen Page, $14.99, paper
Un rancho que bordea el río Salado por Stephen Page, $ 14,99 papel, Reserve su ejemplar HOY
https://finishinglinepress.com/product_info.php?products_id=2662
Half Frost, half Hemingway, Stephen Page tells a gripping tale in verse of a rancher disenchanted with the details of administering land, its livestock, and its unreliable laborers, only to be called by the mythic lure of the nearby Wood and the amorphous deity that emerges to encounter him. The writing here is clean and lovely and permanent, which is rare in storytelling and rarer still in poetry. – Rustin Larson, author of The Philosopher Savant For Jonathan and Teresa, who live on A Ranch Bordering the Salty River, life is rich with pleasures and responsibilities. Set in the vast landscape of Argentina, where “summer is a bread oven that delivers too early” and “the gauchos once stopped to drink mate in front of the fire,” Stephen Page’s poems describe a life where the border between place and state of being are often crossed at a heavy price. The air is scented with eucalyptus, but there are vultures “heavy along the fenceline.” In this place where “they do not honor absentmindedness,” a man has little latitude in life’s juggle of work, love, and spiritual journey. Page manages this precariousness beautifully in these poems. – Leslie McGrath, author of Opulent Hunger, Opulent Rage “Enter the myth” of Stephen Page’s Argentine estancia of moonrings and mate in this love letter to a woman and her land from a former soldier who has “holstered (his) gun and sheathed / (his) knife and got down to the business / of grass.” A Ranch Bordering The Salty River is a beautiful meditation on counting and “uncounting,” of “eucalypti and sycamores,” cattle and cattle thieves, yard hands, a growing family, trials, blessings, legends, and of overseeing a wooded eco-ranch.
– Chip Livingston, author of Naming Ceremony and Crow-Blue, Crow-Black “Stephen Page invites us onto the Ranch with all its beauty and violence. It is a visit we will long remember.”
– g emil reutter, author of Blue Collar Poet #poety ™@finishinglinepress
Stephen Page 