Railman’s Son by LeRoy N. Sorenson

In Railman’s Son, LeRoy Sorenson returns to some of his driving obsessions: the brutal worlds of the rail yards and meat plants, the bars, the legacy of addiction and poverty, and the struggles of those caught up in the generational trauma of family silences and violence.  This is a moving and insightful collection that follows a tormented, compassionate speaker as he seeks to understand the world he has inherited, who refuses to make excuses or find easy redemption; a speaker who can reach the end of his journey through these poems and claim, with heartbreaking honesty and longing: “How I, now,/listen to the silence that has never/left me, aching for a life/other than the one I had.//How little there was.”

–Jude Nutter, author of I Wish I Had a Heart Like Yours, Walt Whitman, Dead Reckoning, and two other collections.

These poems made of hard prairie light keep faith with the past by refusing to look away.  In spare, lean lyrics, Sorenson’s work scours the meat plants, rotgut bars and railroad yards of small Dakota towns.  Fearless, precise, missing nothing, Mr. Sorenson insists on saying what happened, however difficult that might be.  In looking so clearly at ourselves, Railman’s Son illuminates the lives we lead, which in itself is a kind of revelation.

–Mark Conway

LeRoy Sorenson‘s gritty, visceral poems in The Railman’s Son are deeply informed by the wounding of class.  In this, Sorenson is brother to poets like Philip Levine and James Wright, daring to break the silence on an “ism” kept by many otherwise progressive peers.  Rarely in recent poetry do we encounter so many vivid details of the traditional working class life.  “There is nothing so pure as work,” Sorenson says without apparent irony, yet work is also what chews up and spits out so many lives.  Thus this book becomes a kind of ambivalent elegy to an older way of being in the world.  In harnessing such tensions, Sorenson frighteningly reads “the shorthand of American rage,” of which we should all take heed.

–Thomas R. Smith, author of Storm Island