Overview

Learning How to Drown charts a vivid coming-of-age across the rural Midwest. The poems, rich in narrative texture and lyrical introspection, move through grain silos and third-shift factories, train trestles and back-porch folklore. Here, ordinary days tilt toward the mythic. Kerschbaum's speaker navigates small towns and night shifts, witnessing boys daring themselves into adulthood, families weathering hardship, and the stubborn ghosts of what refuses to burn. With tough tenderness and clear-eyed music, these poems turn detasseling cuts, Walmart parking lot midnights, and machine rooms into moments of reckoning. They examine how to love a place you also need to leave. Memory keeps scratching at the door. The poems ask how to swim past fear when the shore disappears. The result is a striking portrait of endurance and the luminous, fragile lives that refuse to be forgotten.

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Reviews

In Learning How to Drown, Joseph Kerschbaum does not hesitate to take us right into the heart and ""belly of the rusted beast."" And that beast is the familiar paradox of loving a place while being forced to radically accept all of its shortcomings. This uniquely Midwestern paradox and ethos is what tethers all of Kerschbaum's tender and ramshackle confessions together. In the first part of the book's titular poem, the author writes, ""I am a tourist / wandering through lives in progress..."" That kind of interior self-reflection is the product of an expert observation-someone who is uniquely attuned to the people inhabiting a place. The people in Kerschbaum's Midwest are full of heart and quiet lives. But their lives resound with profound epiphanies that ""they still hear / scratching at the back porch door / years later."" Kerschbaum is a poet skilled enough to risk sentimentality to give us what we desire-a chance to relive the moments that shaped us, ineffably and forever. -John McCarthy, author of Scared Violent Like Horses Joseph Kerschbaum writes these dark little epics of small-town, blue-collar, midwestern life. His chapbook, Learning How to Drown, rings with authenticity; this is a sensitive, mature poet attuned to people and places, and the terrors and frustrations brewing beneath the surface. Kerschbaum captures broken lives and dead ends both honestly and compassionately, and his poems stayed with me long after I had finished reading. -Justin Lacour, Editor-in-Chief, Trampoline: A Journal of Poetry Learning How to Drown is unapologetically Midwest. There's beauty in the drudgery and harshness of lessons learned here, just as there is in Kerschbaum's poetry. This collection manages to make the mundanity of life extraordinary, almost mythical (as in Into Darkness, where the climbing of a grain silo becomes the ascension of a monolith into the untrodden realm of ""growing up""). Instead of ink, the poet's blood, sweat, and tears are spilled here (as they are through a hard day's work in Detasseling), and Midwest life-farmland, fields, train tracks, Main Street drags, choice made out of boredom and wanderlust-is alive and vibrant from cover to cover. -Curtis Deeter, Editor-in-Chief, Of Rust and Glass This field of poetry doesn't need a mouth to swallow you. Its yellow stoplight blinks, your only warning to slow down to appreciate these stark and introspective jagged lines that aren't afraid to sketch their master's imperfections. Kerschbaum's definitive statements weave and grow, leading you to unexpected trails through time and familiar/unfamiliar spaces. -Jenny Kalahar, Editor-in-Chief, Last Stanza Poetry Journal

Author Information

Joseph Kerschbaum is the author of ten poetry collections and two spoken word albums. His most recent books include Midnight Sunrise, Mirror Box, and Distant Shores of a Split Second. His work has appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including Street Cake Magazine, The Dallas Review, Heimat Review, Wild Roof Journal, Trampoline, Hamilton Stone Review, and Reed Magazine. He has been nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Joseph lives in Bloomington, Indiana with his family, where he continues to write, perform, and support the literary arts.

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