J. Chad Kebrdle has degrees in writing from Ball State University, Indiana University, and Naropa University. He has had works published in Grim and Gilded, Wingless Dreamer, Midwest Futures, and others. He is currently teaching in the writing program at Ball State University. He is also a musician and has done a variety of projects both live and in the studio.
PRAISE:
The Midwest sometimes looks like Mars if you really live in it and can see it for what it is. Eternity. Cruelty. Too real and too dreamy. I’ve known Chad Kebrdle for nearly thirty years, and, like him, I grew up in the Midwest between the rows of corn and the rows between friends of which he writes. I’ve been privy to the bloody noses and the apologies later, the Sunday mornings come-to-Jesus and the shadows that titter and sway near-to-dark. In these tightly packed lyric-narrative poems, juxtaposed with black and white images to set the scene, Kebrdle sees with guts and grace what only someone can, who comes from the place of which they sing. There is a terrible beauty to this book that might just dead-end at the end of all possibility, some place near and far away. Two lane highways, gravel and dirt. Roadside bars, wooded alcoves, the backseats of Chevy’s. Corn fields and soybeans. People too hard and too soft in their hearts. Cemeteries, lovers’ lanes, a mercy that burns. Ponds full of things that can’t swim in them.
–Matt Hart, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/matt-hart
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