Rain on the River

Book excerpt: Chapbooks, musings, poetry, and prose by a folklorist with a “wonderful imagination, eye for detail and command of language” (Publishers Weekly). While Jim Dodge is internationally known for his fiction, his first and abiding passion is poetry. After eighteen years of publishing anonymously and only reading to local crowds in the Pacific Northwest, he began to issue occasional limited-edition letterpress chapbooks, as well as occasional broadsides and, since 1987, a Winter Solstice poem or story, most given as gifts to friends. Rain on the River contains his work collected here for the first time, as well as three dozen previously unpublished poems. Dodge’s verse and short prose offer the same pleasures as his fiction—a splendid ear for language, great emotional range and subtlety, a sharp eye for the illuminating detail, and a sensibility that encompasses outright hilarity, savage wit, and tender marvel, all made eminently accessible through writing of uncompromising clarity and grace. “Jim’s words are his gift to the world. His life is his art; his words are merely tokens of appreciation. Reading the poems and short prose . . . makes me happy to be alive. . . . Mine’s a happiness born from the revelation that ‘money and food and poetry [are] ways to live, not reasons,” as Jim puts it” (Sacramento News & Review).