Trailer Park Psalms: Poems [Paperback]

Winner of the 2023 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize 

Trailer Park Psalmstraces the speaker’s journey beyond his boyhood trailer park, through an American landscape marked by violence—from a gas line explosion in his hometown to his father’s war memories to the scars of colonialism inscribed in place, language, and ecology. Along the way, he searches for sources of awe that might inspire us, even in a compromised world: the everyday miracle of eyesight, the courage of the Voyager spacecrafts, and the “clumsy kindness” of family members trying to mend the damages of the past. In the end, what he finds isn’t faith but the hope that “if there’s a heaven, we will bend / to examine our old selves / and wonder how something so delicate / was ever allowed.” 

"There’s a rural charm and sense of danger lurking in Trailer Park Psalms, but it is exactly the perpetual threat of poverty and violence that make the pieces sing."
—Adriana E. Ramírez,Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Ryler Dustin’s poems achieve a clear and accessible quality, not through the simplicity of idea or emotion (for his poems are rich with surprising language and complex sentiment) but through his remarkable facility with syntax. Indeed, his elegant sentences convey feeling with vulnerability and sensitivity, while achieving what can only be called pure music. The ingenious metaphors inTrailer Park Psalmsmanage to contain the contradictory and conflicting emotions that come with loss, nostalgia, humor, and the effort to cope with the wounds of a complicated personal history.” —Kwame Dawes, author ofUnHistorywith John Kinsella 

 

“Word by word, Ryler Dustin creates a world, complete with its ditches and flames and warnings, as well as the lovers and friends and family who walk briefly throughlSÕ