Trailer Park Psalms traces 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."
"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 in Trailer Par
Kwame Dawes, author of UnHistory with John Kinsella
"Although the poems in Trailer Park Psalms range widely (from a hardscrabble trailer park in the Pacific Northwest to London to the very edge of our galaxy), they are united by Ryler Dustin's fine intelligence and his mastery of image and tone. These poems meditate on the persistence of memory, the difficulties of love, and the curiosities of ecology with real clarity, always offering us voyages t
Kevin Prufer, author of The Art of Fiction: Poems
"The poems in Ryler Dustin's Trailer Park Psalms radiate with ache, pull us toward the awe of memory and love and the holy ringing only a body can make. If Dustin is right, and 'love . . . means to make a space for this wrecked world inside us,' then this collection is a profound act of love, offering the wrecked world inside us a tender home, an exquisite language with which to make itself known.
