Overview

In this debut poetry collection, Joshua Dolezal traces one summer as a ranger in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness of north Idaho, where trail maintenance provides a touchstone for childhood, American history, and masculinity. Someday Johnson Creek takes its name from a real place and also honors Connie Saylor Johnson, who devoted more than forty years to wilderness conservation. Dolezal worked with Johnson for several summers while studying poetry and creative nonfiction with Ted Kooser at the University of Nebraska. Poems in this volume first appeared in magazines such as Hudson Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, RATTLE, and Third Coast.

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Reviews

""To spend time with these words is to be outside in rushing water, alive with hard stone and soft bark, to be amongst the wild with all its roar and pelt. Dolezal is enraptured by his surroundings, and their essence pours throughs his fingers onto the page where we drink them in, are suddenly tumbled, washed, warmed and thrust out again and again into the landscape he loves. A collection dazzling in its claw, and raw with sudden personal sorrows. A delight."" Eleanor Anstruther, author of A Perfect Explanation ""In Someday Johnson Creek, Joshua Dolezal transports us to the Idaho wilderness with all its haunting and redeeming realities. The book opens with his uncle's brush with death after being shot while hunting and ends on grace notes with gratitude for being alive. In-between there are poems of familial cruelty and the raw days of being a wilderness ranger. Dolezal exhibits considerable poetic skill on tough subjects without sentimentality or self-pity in this memorable collection."" Twyla M. Hansen, Nebraska State Poet and author of Feeding the Fire ""Each poem in this collection can be held in the hands of the reader and turned over, with shape, texture, heft, with physicality that defies what naysayers believe of poetry-that it is a no-thing. Here is visceral crunch; Dolezal shapes living heart words inside iron rib works."" Alison Acheson, author of Dance Me to the End ""If Ernest Hemingway had remained Nick Adams, had he allowed himself to be Nick Adams - pounding and hewing a love and pain-born self out of wood and wilderness - he might have been Joshua Dolezal. Hemingway, of course, was never of Montana, where Dolezal emerged both man, attuned to wild nature's way, and writer. But Norman Maclean was, and he, too, fought wildfires and cut his own kind of narrative poetry out of the wilderness, worked and sought his soul there. Now, in a lean, taut poetry that at just the necessary moment exerts its lyrical lift, Dolezal reaches not to conquer nature but toward a hard-earned union, seeking, as in 'Geometric, ' 'the square root of the sum / of this body, this earth.'"" A. Jay Adler, author of Waiting for Word

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