Joe Survant – författare

Weaving together universal themes of family, geography, and death with images of America''s frontier landscape, former Kentucky Poet Laureate Joe Survant has been lauded for his ability to capture the spirit of the land and its people. Kliatt magazine has praised his work, stating, "Survant''s words sing.... This is storytelling at its best."

Exploring the pre-Columbian and frontier history of the commonwealth, The Land We Dreamed is the final installment in the poet''s trilogy on rural Kentucky. The poems in the book feature several well-known figures and their stories, reimagining Dr. Thomas Walker''s naming of the Cumberland Plateau, Mary Draper Ingles''s treacherous journey from Big Bone Lick to western Virginia following her abduction by Native Americans, and Daniel Boone''s ruminations on the fall season of 1770. Survant also explores the Bluegrass from the perspectives of the chiefs of the Shawnee and Seneca tribes.

Drawing on primary documents such as the seventeenth-century reports of French Jesuit missionaries, excerpts from the Draper manuscripts, and the journals of pioneers George Croghan and Christopher Gist, this collection surveys a broad and under-recorded history. Poem by poem, Survant takes readers on an imaginative expedition -- through unspoiled Shawnee cornfields, down the wild Ohio River, and into the depths of the region''s ancient coal seams.

Chosen by Rachel Hadas as the winner of the  Arkansas Poetry Award, Anne & Alpheus: 1842–1882 is a compelling duet of monologues between a frontier man and woman surviving the hardships and recording the small triumphs of life in rural nineteenth-century Kentucky.

Ambitious in breadth and scope, these poems chart the loves and losses of early marriage, the terrors of civilian life during the Civil War, and the universal sorrows of aging, loneliness, and death. Through the distinct voices of Anne and Alpheus Waters, Joe Survant has fashioned a collection with all the sweep of a novel, all the dramatic intensity, poem by poem, of short fiction, and all the earthy, human lyricism of the dramatic monologue. These poems take us into the tobacco sheds, put us behind the plow, let us smell the soil, and carry us under the stars where Anne and Alpheus walked.