Image description front: Front cover of Bootjack showing a sepia photograph of a family standing beside a pickup truck beneath the title.

Image description back: Back cover of Bootjack with descriptive text, critical praise quotations, ISBN, and publisher information on a wood‑grain background.

Back cover text: John S. Nelson has published poetry and other work in journals, magazines, and newspapers. Recent publications include poems in Montana Mouthful, Pasque Petals, Briar Cliff Review, South Dakota Magazine, Poetry Motel, and Delmar. He is a retired professor of English for New Media at Dakota State University in Madison, SD. A native of Fort Pierre, South Dakota, he writes
about work, travel, and other human and celestial activities. John Nelson's Bootjack deftly spans the tensions of perdurability, time, and place, In taut, tightly-crafted lyrics, the poems in Bootjack gracefully turn and spiral through family cycles, historical cycles, and ecological/botanical cycles, as witnessed through and within the open and painterly vistas of the American West and Midwest. Under Nelson's keen eye, these poems evoke place and space with a generously capacious gaze and an aching recognizability. This is
an impressive and riveting collection by a gifted poet.
— Lee Ann Roripaugh, Author of tsunami vs. the fukushima 50 In Bootjack, John Nelson weaves love, family, loss, place, and remembrance with unsentimental and sometimes startling images of nature, where fireflies become "path lights for the gone." Nelson takes us from a morningin Georgia, to the king of cottonwood trees in South Dakota, to drinking with Scots in Corfu, and back to a somehow familiar past on the prairie, wherever were from, in moves that feel both organic and seamless. Nelson's poems fit wonderfully into those spaces we all keep open, like "a partial moon fits perfectly into that
cavity / you realize suddenly has been the core of your heart." - Marcella Remund, author of The Book of Crooked Prayer and
The Sea is My Ugly Twin In these poems about work and family and creativity and love, John Nelson speaks a universal language, yet these poems have that particular terroir that comes from being rooted in the West. In a companionable and assured voice, Nelson turns shopping into a meditation on spirituality, a relay race into a reflection on striving, an egged car into a celebration of aging. Whether he is walking right to the edge of existential terror or celebrating human goodness and humor, Nelson is a magician at shifting between the tangible and the dreamlike, and he constantly reveals the most ordinary things to be suffused
with rich and unexpected meaning. - Kent Meyers, author of The Work of Wolves, Light in the Crossing,
The River Warren, and The Witness of Combines