American Poet: (Working Lives)

American Poet: A Novel by Jeff Vande Zande

About the Author :
Jeff Vande Zande began to write as a poet in reaction to his father who was a fiction writer. �It was a rebellion of sorts,� he says. Some of his poems were nominated for Pushcart Prizes, and one of them was selected to appear in Ted Kooser�s syndicated newspaper column, American Life in Poetry. His poems from chapbooks were eventually collected in a book, Poems New, Used, and Rebuilds (March Street Press). Vande Zande began writing short stories seriously in 1997 and focused more on his fiction after that. �More and more, the world came to me as stories rather than poems,� he says. Bottom Dog Press has published his Emergency Stopping and Other Stories (2004) and his novel, Landscape with Fragmented Figures (2009). Additionally, he has published a novella collected with five stories, Threatened Species (Whistling Shade Press, 2010). The author has taught for the last ten years at Delta College, a community college in Michigan that serves the cities of Midland, Bay City, and Saginaw. American Poet comes out of his experience as a poet, as a teacher, and as a transplanted advocate of Saginaw, declaring it, �a city with a rich history that includes struggle, but also the seeds of its rebirth.�

Review :
"This coming-of-age tale centers on a young poet, who is ill-prepared for and frustrated by the hometown he returns to, where he fights with his father and with himself. Set against the backdrop of a broken city and a failed relationship, the novel champions poetry and the underdog--whether it be our seemingly--incompetent narrator, a baseball team, or a failing non-profit. With American Poet, Jeff Vande Zande has written a love poem for the city of Saginaw, and, by extension, a love poem for Flint, Gary, Cleveland, or any forgotten city in the Rust Belt." -Gina Myers In addition to narrating the fine novel you're now holding, Denver Hoptner (Jeff Vande Zande's particularized composite of hundreds of thousands of young writers adrift in America today) does something, something of consequence, and does it without thinking (just as real poetry can't be simply thought into being). A friend of his tells him, "You made the symbol real." By way of Vande Zande's passion, American Poet reaches through the ramifying shadow of Theodore Roethke to the hoped-for communal force of poetry itself. Denver's story has hurt me into feeling uncomfortably young and vulnerable again, but this time that young self of mine has been understood. -William Heyen