Artifact Eleven
| UW-L Author: | William Stobb, Ph.D. English |
| Copyright: | 2010 |
| Publisher: | Black Rock Press |
Stobb, William. Artifact Eleven. Reno, NV: Black Rock Press, 2010.
In this collection of desert fragments, poet William Stobb works with a common imperative: to render an experience of geological time by assembling ruins in striations. Full of broken imagery, intimations of distant life, Stobb’s poems are both elegiac and celebratory. Yes, our traces may be lost in time in Boom, the fishing villages along Lake Winnemucca blink into geology but in its larger gestures, in scales beyond comprehension, the world inspires wonder. As it tours the Great Basin from Mt. Rose to Wheeler Peak, from the Black Rock Desert to Las Vegas, from the findings of eminent archaeologist Robert Heizer to the massive earthworks of his son, the artist, Michael Heizer Artifact Eleven presents the West on its own terms, with the integrity of long valleys and rock faces, our lives like veins of ore compressed over millennia.
About the Author
Assistant Professor of English, William Stobb's five poetry collections have garnered a variety of awards and praises, including selection for the National Poetry Series. Of Stobb's 2011 Penguin Poets volume, Absentia, Alison Hawthorne Deming writes: "The vitality of these poems, the necessity of their questioning, makes life feel deep and strange and satisfying." Stobb's poems appear regularly in journals such as American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, and DIAGRAM. In 2012, Stobb's work was selected from 1500 entries as the winner of the editors' prize from Spoon River Poetry Review. Beginning in 2013, Stobb will transition into a position as Chair of the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission, and he works on the editorial staff of the award-winning literary magazine, Conduit.