The News as Usual
Poems
The News as Usual showcases the work of a gifted poet who employs language at its richest. Yenser captures lyrics and blues, ballads and villanelles, and even a crown of sonnets. Sonically rich and filled with detail, these poems link mortality with fishing, nature with protoplasm—constantly finding ways to explore the inner and outer worlds in ways at once understated and wise.
In The News as Usual, Kelly Yenser has achieved a De Rerum Natura of the Great Plains through his attention to the unexpected beauty of small things and the heartbreak of loss and love.
The poems are musical, tactile, beautifully built. Yenser’s poems are themselves ‘a maze / of immeasure, a wild / scoring.’
With grace, precision, and humor, Kelly Yenser captures the seasons of Kansas in a small town. Summer twilight, baseball, the beloved dogs—glimpses of the news as usual that gather into the seasons of a lifetime. Spoon River Anthology, Winesburg, Ohio—Yenser leaves them in the dust.
Jon Kelly Yenser is the author of Walter’s Yard and The Disambiguation of Katydids. His work has appeared in a variety of publications including Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, and Elysian Fields Quarterly.
Part I
Invocation to Lucretius
Railing against People Railing against Kansas
The State Bird
Lunch at the Flint Hills Diner
The Salesman
Fishing on the Ninnescah
Current Events
The Disambiguation of Katydids
Revisiting the Weather
Broadcast
Shagging Flies
Making Peace
When I Got Back
Lucretius Applied on the Plains
Part II
Spring Fever Blues
The Abundant Shame of Spring, the Forsythia
Early Work
At 4:48
We Lose Two Dogs
There’s a Dog Loose
The Elysian Fields Apartments
Great Horned Owl
Walter Fails
Walter and I Play Clue
Another Owl in the Neighborhood
Fall Leaves Blues
Cleaning Up in October
An Elegy ahead of Time
Early Snow
Part III
Transition
Running Dog Blues
Dream of Departure
Departing LAX
Anticipating Retirement, I Explore Guatemala
Last Hours in Antigua City
Window Shopping in a Fever
Reviewing the Troops in the Ruins
Part IV
Note to Self
Finishing Touch
Fishing the St. Joe
The Hour for Walking Dogs
Afterword
Acknowledgments
