What Others Say<\/h2>\n

If you had to pick just one utensil from the kitchen drawer, just one piece of cutlery as tool and weapon, most of us, no doubt, would reach for the fork or knife. Both are defined by their sharpness, both can tear and cut and stab. But Jim Minick turns away from all that and in his hand wields a spoon . . . Yes, a spoon\u2014lowly and simple and dull\u2014an implement whose usefulness is an act of holding, whose power is steadfast tenderness. And this collection\u2014The Intimacy of Spoons<\/em><\/strong>\u2014is a result of making that choice time and again, each poem showing just how the worst of what we face today\u2014be the climate crisis or our aging bodies or our distracted, grief-stricken lives\u2014can be fought with the weapon of empathy and grace. The result then is a book filled with dogs and birds and deep attention, each poem a spoonful of medicine to administer healing to our broken world.”<\/p>\n

\u2014 Nickole Brown<\/strong>, author of To Those Who Were Our First Gods<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Jim Minick declaims, \u201cThis is how the Earth sings,\u201d and in his poems he works out a kind of peace, a form of grace, informed by a deep and loving knowledge of place, tended to with compassion and praise and a cleareyed gaze that lets nothing escape. He offers up the sound a coyote makes, explains our kinship with oak and elm, claiming this world is enough, if we\u2019d only care for it.”<\/p>\n

\u2014 Todd Davis<\/strong>, author of Coffin Honey<\/em><\/strong> and Native Species <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Throughout this collection, Jim Minick\u2019s own bright song traces the tender fascination he has sustained for various winged creatures over his lifetime\u2014what they have gifted him by association, what he has learned from them, and the pleasure he has taken in rapt observation. Glimpses of mortality, ecological precarity, and Minick\u2019s many encounters with birds, take us deep into a landscape of the heart with a mature poet who grieves extinction, damage, and destruction, as much as he celebrates his love for feathered creatures and their persistent songs.

\nAt the heart of this accessible and skillful collection, readers will appreciate Minick\u2019s love of his wife, earth wisdom, and of course birds, while he grapples with how humankind has emptied the garden not just of themselves, in the myth of Eden, but of many other possibilities through forms of careless self-indulgence that have proven reckless for our entire ecosystem. In the rousing and ironic \u201cMal and Slick\u2019s Ballad,\u201d Minick drills into the dangerous place of religion in all this damage we\u2019ve wrought on a quest for heaven. Jim Minick is a poet who can range from high to low rhetoric, employing formal grace or friction, always with clarity of purpose and characteristic honesty of expression. The Intimacy of Spoons<\/em><\/strong> is a collection to read and reread to unlock its treasures.”<\/p>\n

\u2014 Cathryn Hankla<\/strong>, author of Lost Places: On Losing and Finding Home<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

With a near-boundless affection for the overlooked and quotidian, The Intimacy of Spoons<\/em><\/strong> reminds us that we are surrounded by the miraculous if we but choose to notice it. From the way he recounts the small kindness of rescuing a cardinal to the philosophical depth he finds in considering the common teaspoon, it\u2019s clear Jim Minick is a poet of generosity and kindness. By turns wistful, whimsical, and wise, this is a book I\u2019ll be rereading for a long time to come. It\u2019s a delight.”<\/p>\n

\u2014 Doug Van Gundy<\/strong>, author of A Charm Against Forgetting<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Here is a book that opens the kitchen drawer and finds a \u201cmirror that fogs with breath\u201d among the ladles. The Intimacy of Spoons<\/em><\/strong> shines its light into a <\/p>\n

\nworld made bright
\nby a creature who
\nknows dark\n<\/div>\n

In these poems, Mortality is the name of a dog who will lick your face and the Fix-It Man tells of the double murder of his parents. Looking hard at logged land, Minick speaks tenderly of shade. Listening to the rain \u201cwith one ear,\u201d he extends a hand to those who want to find their \u201cway back into the earth.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2014 Amy Wright<\/strong>, author of Paper Concert<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\n

<\/div>\n

---

\n\n\n\n

<\/span><\/p>\n Without Warning: The Tornado of Udall, Kansas<\/h2>\n Without Warning<\/em> is out in the world and available anywhere you buy books. \nConsider supporting indie bookstores or coming to an event. \nCheck the EVENTS<\/a> page for schedule.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n <\/p>\n \n Without Warning: The Tornado of Udall, Kansas<\/strong><\/em> \nBison Books \nISBN 978-1496231451<\/div>\n \n ORDER<\/h2>\n <\/a> \n<\/a> \n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n I<\/span>n 1955 the small town of Udall, Kansas, was home to oil field workers, homemakers, and teenagers looking ahead to their futures. But on the night of May 25, an F5 tornado struck their town without warning. In three minutes the tornado destroyed most of the buildings, including the new high school. It toppled the water tower. It lifted a pickup truck, stripped off its cab, and hung the frame in a tree. By the time the tornado moved on, it had killed 82 people and injured 270 others, more than half the town\u2019s population of roughly 600 people. It remains the deadliest tornado in the history of Kansas.<\/p>\n Jim Minick\u2019s nonfiction account, Without Warning<\/em><\/strong>, tells the human story of this disaster, moment by moment, from the perspectives of those who survived. His spellbinding narrative connects this history to our world today. Minick demonstrates that even if we have never experienced a tornado, we are still a people shaped and defined by weather and the events that unfold in our changing climate. Through the tragedy and hope found in this story of destruction, Without Warning tells a larger story of community, survival, and how we might find our way through the challenges of the future.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n What Others Say<\/h2>\n A time capsule of rural American lives and a testament to the tenacity and grit of the human spirit, Without Warning<\/em><\/strong> captures a community before, during, and after one of the most devastating natural disasters in our nation\u2019s history. This is a story of loss and despair, resilience and hope, all rendered stunningly by prose deeply measured and tightly wrought. Minick is a master of the form.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014 David Joy<\/strong>, author of When These Mountains Burn<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Without Warning<\/em><\/strong> is a page-turning disaster narrative in the tradition of The Perfect Storm<\/em> and Isaac\u2019s Storm<\/em>: spare, vivid, suspenseful, meticulously researched, and utterly harrowing. But the havoc an F5 tornado wrecked on this quintessential Kansas small town in the spring of 1955 is only part of the story here. By taking the arc all the way from the calm before the storm to the months-long labor of rebuilding and reanimating, Jim Minick has brought an entire community lovingly to life. At heart, this is a book about how what\u2019s best about our country confronts and overcomes the worst of our weather.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014 David Laskin<\/strong>, author of The Children\u2019s Blizzard<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Without Warning<\/em><\/strong> is a vivid testimony to why modern-day weather forecasting deeply matters, especially to those so often in the path of these dangerous storms. But it is also a story of resiliency\u2014a portrait of people and a town that lost almost everything but somehow found the strength to go on. It\u2019s only through the stories of survivors that we can try to comprehend the precarious nature of tornadoes and prepare as much as one can for a phenomenon that is still so violently unpredictable.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014 Holly Bailey<\/strong>, author of The Mercy of the Sky<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Jim Minick turns anecdote into story, and story into the personal history of an American town, a town that represents a blueprint for responding to other natural crises. The images are often haunting\u2014the ding-ding, ding-ding of a railway crossing bell, lost photos found in a pasture ten miles away, a \u201cmountainous grave\u201d of debris. Twelve years of interviews and research accompany this work, allowing the author the time it takes to become familiar with people\u2014in some sense, a neighbor. Minick wants us to witness the resilience, generosity, kindness, and capacity for change that the storm broke loose that day, amid all its terrible destruction. His hopeful voice is one worth listening to\u2014from the book\u2019s beginning to the wonderful epilogue that concludes it.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014 Joyce Dyer<\/strong>, author of Pursuing John Brown: On the Trail of a Radical Abolitionist<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n This is vivid, compelling narrative history with the detail, tension, and pacing of fiction, meaning it\u2019s hard to put down. Though I\u2019ve never been to Udall, Kansas, I feel as if I visited in 1955 and met the residents. Their stories are ones we\u2019re all going to need more than ever. If catastrophe strikes us like it did Udall, the big question is going to be, how well will we survive as a community?\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014 David L. Bristow<\/strong>, author of Nebraska History Moments<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n \n<\/p>\n \n Books by Jim Minick – click any book to learn more<\/p>\n \n <\/a><\/li>\n <\/a><\/li>\n <\/a><\/li>\n <\/a><\/li>\n <\/a><\/li>\n <\/a><\/li>\n <\/a><\/li>\n <\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/section>\n \u200b \n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Intimacy of Spoons The Intimacy of Spoons is out in the world and available anywhere you buy books. Consider supporting indie bookstores or coming to an event. Check the EVENTS page for schedule. The Intimacy of Spoons Madville Publishing ISBN: 978-1-956440-75-1 paperback ISBN: 978-1-956440-76-8 …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"template-full.php","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-7","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jim-minick.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/7","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jim-minick.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jim-minick.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jim-minick.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jim-minick.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7"}],"version-history":[{"count":31,"href":"http:\/\/jim-minick.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/7\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":993,"href":"http:\/\/jim-minick.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/7\/revisions\/993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jim-minick.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}