Dust Runner by Jessica Jewell

Jessica Jewell’s powerful collection Dustrunner immerses us in a landscape of harsh beauty, faith, and endurance. Jewell situates the audience as confidante, using spare lyric meditations, evocative narratives, and glimpses of the epistolary to offer a deep recounting of life during the Dust Bowl. With a memorable cast of characters akin to the performers of a play, Dustrunner forges emotional connections with the speakers and the land. One poem tells us that, “The horizon is brimless / but I can still make out / a rounding from edge to edge,” demonstrating both innocence and keen understanding of place. In “For the Body and Baker,” we see that, “…the sky didn’t bring water, / dropped dirt, instead, for hours / until morning and night lost the colors for telling / one from the other.” Jewell’s masterful embrace of persona is a gift to readers, allowing us to examine history through an astonishing lens.

–Mary Biddinger, author of Partial Genius

Jessica Jewell’s Dust Runner recounts the story of the migrants from the closed mines of Kentucky to the dust storms (“black blizzards”) of Oklahoma in the 1930s. Through chants, prayers, letters, persona poems, and social history, Jewell has created an astonishing and moving poetic hybrid of an economic and ecological disaster. The raw tragedy of these events is rendered tender and heart-breaking through Jewell’s strong syllabic line, through her close attention to historical detail and to the imagined lives of one family of those times. Dust Runner makes “a safe place…to tell this story of dust /and what some people did to clear it.” It is haunting and disturbingly contemporary, an essential contribution to our history as seen through the deep imagining of a gifted poet.

–Maggie Anderson