American Cycle

Lisa Kastner spent forty-seven years building this sequence of long poems, which draws on American folk tales and the nation's past. Love, local legend, history, justice, memory, achievement and the passage of time run through the work.

Each poem is voiced through a different figure and dialect. The language shifts from the Spanish words that entered speech in Old California, to the blunt humor of Paul Bunyan's tall tales, to the African-American vernacular of John Henry. Chief Joseph's plain, formal oratory and the Old West idiom of Wyatt Earp appear alongside the showman's patter of P. T. Barnum, the technical vocabulary of Amelia Earhart's aviation, and the backwoods speech of the Blue Ridge.

The poems are as varied in form, style and narrative as they are in voice, so readers come to the book for its range of sound as much as for its stories. It suits readers who enjoy experimental verse, American folklore and the spoken texture of regional and historical language.