Mortal Stakes ; Faint Thunder New Poems

Timothy Murphy lives on the Great Plains. He has been a grain and hog farmer and, like Wallace Stevens, an insurance salesman, but the twin joys of his life are poetry and hunting. Murphy's poetry explores faith, family, spirituality, death, farming, friendship, love, and sexuality, yet it is profoundly rooted in place -- the Red River watershed in North Dakota and western Minnesota. He tries to make sense of the wide sweep of the northern plains, to explore how place shapes poetry and how poetry shapes one’s experience of place.