Finding Token Creek: New & Selected Writing, 19752020

Robert Alexander grew up in Massachusetts. He attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison and for several years taught in the Madison Public Schools. After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, he worked for many years as a freelance editor. From 1993-2001, he was a contributing editor at New Rivers Press, serving the final two years as New Rivers’ creative director. Alexander is the founding editor of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series at White Pine Press. He divides his time between southern Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.His books of poetry include White Pine Sucker River, What the Raven Said, and Richmond Burning. In addition, he has two works of literary history, Five Forks: Waterloo of the Confederacy, and The Northwest Ordinance: Constitutional Politics and the Theft of Native Land.

“This beautiful collection of new and selected writings from Robert Alexander’s rich career as poet, editor, scholar and critic, covers a lot of territory. And that territory is better understood as something more deep than wide, something as much below the surface as above, whether the setting is a lake in Wisconsin or a hotel room in Richmond. A master of the prose poem, that hybrid form born at the crossroads of story and poem, a place where sacred meets profane, Alexander is a lover of the natural world and the human condition, the poems as full of yearning, puzzled people as they are of birds in flight, watching the author with the same intensity that he watches them from his canoe drifting close to shore. There is an uncanny stillness, a hush at the heart of the poems that is nearly palpable. “Here, at last, is a world you can learn to call your own” (“Now the Lake Is Empty”).” —Holly Iglesias, author of Boxing Inside the Box: Women’s Prose Poetry “In this rich retrospective of subtly artful and distinctively American prose poems, Robert Alexander discovers sufficiency and even the marvelous in the given, presented to us with affection and clarity. In several of the compressed narratives in which he appears as his Thoreauvian alter ego Ralph, the rugged landscape of Upper Peninsula Michigan itself becomes a beloved central character. Alexander understands, just as Martin Buber said, that all true living is encounter. In these poems encounters abound, not only with the human and nonhuman but in one eerily timely poem a monument to "Calhoun the Nullifier" in the South. In its humane sympathies and breadth, Finding Token Creek beckons the reader with its promise, "Here, at last, is a world you can learn to call your own.”" —Thomas R. Smith, author of Windy Day at Kabekona: New and Selected Prose Poems

• CONTENTSIntroduction: Prose/PoetryRichmond BurningClouds of SwallowsMaggie MayLate One NightFrog-pond in AprilAfternoonRichmond BurningThis Year Ralph SeesWhat We Can Learn from Other PrimatesMuskratAfter the ReadingThe Clouds Pregnant with RainTwo about DogsPedestalRalph Rises Early Archive Like Our Shadow-SelvesSeptemberWhatever DanceCrowsTurtle in the AfternoonA Black Spruce MeditationA Puffball Nearly Sphericalfrom What the Raven SaidRalph in His CanoeRalph Goes to the BirdsI n a Month This Will All BeThe Naming of Muskrat PointEvery Day RalphThe Night the Honey Locusts BloomVacation NotesRalph Attends the Turtle ConventionLake SolsticeEagle and Otter at MidsummerIn the SportsmanRalph Among the Lily PadsWhat I Wanted to Tell YouOn the Last Day of SummerOnly in RetrospectRalph Wakes One MorningOld PossumMosquito BayRalph Wakes One MorningWhat the Raven SaidPaddler’s TechniqueNow the Lake is Emptyfrom White Pine Sucker RiverWhere Ralph LivedAt the PartyFrom Where He SatWhite Pine Sucker RiverWeekendMickeyLibraryWas It Louis AragonA Joe Pass Guitar SoloOne of the GuysEvery Night He’d See HerFinding Token CreekMy Father Had a Small LabFor Years My FatherAt Night the StreetRainRalph Finds a New ParkCornSupermarketsVacationGarageSnow at Ten O’clockfrom Five Forks: Waterloo of the ConfederacyCalhoun’s Monumentpostscript: Ralph & the Rabbit