Overview

Winner of the 2025 Press 53 Award for Poetry, Meant to Be is a collection of wide-ranging and unexpected poems about maintaining your sanity while trying to hold down a job and provide for your family. Each poem is a search for wisdom and intelligence in the hum-drum moments of the day. Whether coaching a girls sixth grade basketball game, assembling a king-size bed in the shadow of his father-in-law's scowl, or enduring the vulgar heckles of high school students driving the neighborhood at night, the poet discovers minute yet worthwhile nuggets of joy. As poetry series editor Tom Lombardo said, ""Most of these poems use easy humor, though never too blatant, never a chuckle. Just admiration and a smile.""

Full Product Details

9781950413959

Table of Contents

Reviews

Meant to Be is by turns acerbic, tender, laugh-out-loud-funny, and dark. The sneaky-smart poems in Dave Nielsen's second book transcend convention at the same time that they invoke it, for example through the subjects of basketball and family. These poems ""think outside the box"" to articulate the absurdity of 21st century life, moving elegantly between the quotidian and the metaphysical. Meant to Be will speak to people who say they don't like poetry and those who live by it. -Natasha Sajé, author of The Future Will Call You Something Else Madcap comedy is the first thing that pulls a reader into Meant to Be, Dave Nielsen's exhilarating thrill ride of poems, his second collection, but underneath the humor is a deep well of meditative brooding. A combination of the wacky and the wistful runs through the book, along with a devotion to basketball and family. Nielsen is a storyteller adept at catching moments, such as anxiety on a high diving board and horseback riding with his father when they ""never followed any trails / back then, just rode down // into one alpine bowl and back out again."" The poet's ventures into the dark, even when ""taking the garbage out,"" allow him to confront the mysteries and absurdities of the world and beyond. When he muses on earthquakes, for example, he thinks of the ""real earthquake"" that ""makes no noise, / sneaks up behind you,"" so that ""In a moment, your whole body is trembling."" -John Philip Drury, author of The Teller's Cage Anything can happen in a Dave Nielsen poem and usually does: bumping into God in Home Depot, making hootenany pancakes, composing in a ski mask. Hint: the trick is getting ""the mask to just float there and for the words to appear without any hands."" These poems will keep you turning the page to see what absurd and tender thing will happen next. Take courage, they seem to say. Being alive is temporary, being human is forever. -Lance Larsen, author of Making a Kingdom of It

Author Information

Dave Nielsen is the author of Unfinished Figures, winner of the 2016 Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry. His work has appeared in The Southern Review, Southern Poetry Review, Tampa Review, South Carolina Review, 2River View, Aethlon, and numerous other literary journals and magazines. He studied English at the University of Cincinnati and now lives in Salt Lake City with his wife and kids.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available