At Home on This Moveable Earth

Nebraska State Poet Kloefkorn's third memoir (after This Death by Drowning and Restoring the Burnt Child) recounts his childhood and adolescence, creating from short vignettes a haunting and memorable panorama of mid-century rural Kansas. Although later chapters take the reader into Kloefkorn's college years, the narration has a dreamy, child-like quality throughout: Kloefkorn wonders about the world around him and is amazed by it all, from small details (the way his father and brother curse) to events of grave significance (almost being flattened by a tractor). Kloefkorn's sonorous prose and poetic sensibilities heighten the reader's perception of life, and despite the wonderment of Kloefkorn's narrative, the book's structure is carefully wrought; he uses counterpoint, flashbacks, shifting points of view and variations on themes to shape his memoir. Kloefkorn is a consummate storyteller with a keen eye and a gift for language that is beautiful in its simplicity.