Synopses & Reviews
"Nystroms gift as a poet is that she doesnt stop looking, and her poems make sure it is all still there for us to see."Eamon Grennan
The landscape of Torn Sky is South Dakota, a place of extremes, where parched land meets frigid air and exiled Native Americans still struggle to live in peace alongside ranchers. Nystroms poems weave together the voices of her childhood with ghosts of the last two tumultuous centuries and articulate with such subtle and unsentimental grace that each side is understood.
Debra Nystrom was born in Pierre, South Dakota. She is the author of one previous book, A Quarter Turn. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, and teaches at the University of Virginia.
Torn Skyis the sixty-second title to be published by Sarabande Books, a nonprofit literary press headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky. Founded in 1994 to publish poetry and short fiction, Sarabande's mission is to disburse these works with diligence and integrity, and to serve as an educational resource to teachers and students of creative writing. Since the 1996 debut of the press, our titles have received positive review attentions from nationally distinguished media including The New York Times Book Review, Publisher's Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, American Book Review, Small Press, The Nation, and Library Journal.
Debra Nystrom is a Sarabande In Education featured author.
Review
"Debra Nystrom's genius in Torn Skyis to give us a version of the American West that includes the mythic and the epic, but doesn't exclude the historical and the personal. Intimate, searching, deeply skeptical, these poems are as beautifully written as they are morally challenging and unexpected."
Tom Sleigh
"...Torn Skyis haunted by the windy presence of the prairie: light-swept, fierce with bitter histories, an openness both bracing and aching. This is a book of deep conviction, alive with character and incident, richly peopled."
Mark Doty
"This is a book so imbedded in the landscape of longing that it flows and echoes like a prairie stream. The life of a young woman growing up in the Dakotas instructed by the sky, the living ghosts of the Lakota nation, and a straight-talking father who farms the land is born anew in Nystrom's poems in Cather-like power and unforgettable beauty."
Carol Muske
Synopsis
"Nystrom’s gift as a poet is that she doesn’t stop looking, and her poems make sure it is all still there for us to see."—Eamon Grennan
The landscape of Torn Sky is South Dakota, a place of extremes, where parched land meets frigid air and exiled Native Americans still struggle to live in peace alongside ranchers. Nystrom’s poems weave together the voices of her childhood with ghosts of the last two tumultuous centuries and articulate with such subtle and unsentimental grace that each side is understood.
Debra Nystrom was born in Pierre, South Dakota. She is the author of one previous book, A Quarter Turn. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, and teaches at the University of Virginia.
Synopsis
Moving, unsentimental portraits of Native Americans and other South Dakotans.
About the Author
Nystrom grew up in South Dakota, where she returns each year to family land on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation. She has published two previous books of poetry, Torn Sky and A Quarter Turn. Her current work has appeared in Ploughshares, Slate, Agni, Five Points, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and TriQuarterly. She teaches at the University of Virginia.