With stunning, layered imagery and glowing insights, Moder’s American Parade Routes pulls readers into the landscape of Northern Wisconsin where “…owls practice magic low over rabbit fields” and connects our inner lives to the plant and animal lives that populate this green earth. The collection is a chapel: each poem a stained-glass window depicting a different scene, a meditation with the power to shape light.
-Darci Schummer, author of Six Months in the Midwest and The Ballad of Two Sisters
These are poems you want to read a delicious line from out loud to whomever is sitting next to you. Generous and beautiful, they keep company with deep woods and northern rivers, with animals looking back at the poet looking at them. Reading them feels like a gift.
--Maud Lavin
Pushcart Prize nominee Maud Lavin is the author of PUSH COMES TO SHOVE (MIT), CLEAN NEW WORLD (MIT), and CUT WITH THE KITCHEN KNIFE (Yale UP, a New York Times Notable Book) and the editor of THE OLDEST WE'VE EVER BEEN (Arizona) and two other anthologies.
I was first introduced to Tim Moder’s writing when he sent some work to Paddler Press a couple of years ago. Immediately, his written images drew me into his natural world of Northern Wisconsin. Moder’s new poetry collection speaks deeply of his love for the land and the moments that carve deep, memorable lines into our memories. Reading these poems brings up moments from my own life; indeed, if you have spent any time in nature, Moder’s words will remind you of things you forgot you knew, intimate moments spent with birds, dragonflies, and afternoons by long-abandoned shacks in the woods watching beavers. What do we bring back from our time in nature when we are stuck inside the four walls of offices and work spaces? A turtle’s shell? A Robin’s nest? A left antler found on a walk? Of course we do. Those items, beautiful and intricate, are constant, physical reminders of our Creator and our place in The Wild. When we can’t get back to nature as often as we should, when we make excuses or say life gets too busy, Moder’s poems will remind us of why need to.
-Deryck N. Robertson author of All We Remember and Editor-in-Chief of Paddler Press. When not writing, he can usually be found drinking maple roast coffee around a campfire or in the stern of his canoe in Algonquin Park.