Book of Drought

Rob Carney is the author of eight previous books of poems, most recently Call and Response (Black Lawrence Press 2021) and The Book of Sharks (Black Lawrence 2018), which won the 15 Bytes Book Award. He is a recipient of the Milton Kessler Memorial Prize in Poetry, the Robinson Jeffers/Tor House Foundation Award for Poetry, and he has written a featured series called “Old Roads, New Stories” for the award-winning online journal Terrain.org for the last nine years. Carney has read his work on national public radio and at conferences, festivals, and universities across the country. Favorite drink: coffee. Favorite animal: the Great White. He is a Professor of English at Utah Valley University and lives in Salt Lake City.

“Congratulations to Rob Carney on his winning manuscript, The Book of Drought. One of the most original and powerful manuscripts I've come across in years!” —Richard Blanco, Contest Judge#8220;During drought, everything becomes dust. Rob Carney’s newest book elegizes this loss, offers poignant odes to dry streambeds and withered plants, tells fables about vanished bears, herons, and lightning. The poetics are deft. Carney’s work has long amazed with his sometimes rowdy, always memorable music. This book, though, is written with restraint. The poems often feel like we’re eavesdropping on conversations—sad anecdotes of barely remembered rivers, sharp longings for vanished blossoms. But these voices aren’t always wistful: the young inheritors of this desolation lament and rage. Who can blame them? They may never sink their feet in mud, jump carefree into icy water. And yet, by the end of this book, we also hear a whisper of hope. The last section—'If the drought breaks'—speaks of the possibility of mud and snails, the return of trees. The Book of Drought speaks to our moment. It is the best book of poetry that I’ve read in years.” —Tod Marshall, 2016-2018 Washington State Poet Laureate“The Book of Drought weaves a song of loss and irrevocably changed landscapes. With an empathy for those dispossessed of such places, Carney’s couplets invoke both ‘the sorrow of glaciers’ and the power of poetry to pass on that loss. Water, and its lack, is the tenor of the song, binding people together with poignancy, humor, and, in the end, hope. Essential reading.” —Daniel Spoth, author of Ruin and Resilience and Board Member of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment“I love this! I am so taken with Rob Carney’s voice, the plainness of it lacking urgency, but with the underlying dread of what is to come. Bravo. It is funny, too—and all the more believable because of his humor, future speculation, observance of nature (or lack thereof). Wow." —Dede Cummings, Publisher, Green Writers Press