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The Intimacy of Spoons explores the many metaphors of the spoon: from love and marriage to the spoon of a grave that holds our bodies; from the darkness of loss and night, where “the Big Dipper is nothing but / the oldest spoon pointing us home”; to the darkness of lungs transformed into art. The poems cover a wide variety of topics—cultural, political, familial, and natural—and always, underlying these poems is the song of birds—with broken wings or clear voices, avian muses filling our forests now or long gone. There are nods to Basho and Thoreau, to Eliot and Frost, Dickinson and Milton, this last, a long poem that retells the story of Adam and Eve from the point of view of Mal, the apple. Likewise, The Intimacy of Spoons shares a variety of forms, from sonnet, sestina, and villanelle to syllabics, lyrics, and a ballad. At the center of the book is the long poem, “Elegy for My Body,” which uses wordplay and contrasting voices to explore mortality, because “You can’t really do time; / it simply does us, / or undoes us, / us beings in the time being being beings / on Times Squared / waiting for the big ball to fall.” The poems of The Intimacy of Spoons return us to everyday stories and objects, common yet profound.

What Others Say

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—lowly and simple and dull—an implement whose usefulness is an act of holding, whose power is steadfast tenderness. And this collection—The Intimacy of Spoons—is a result of making that choice time and again, each poem showing just how the worst of what we face today—be the climate crisis or our aging bodies or our distracted, grief-stricken lives—can 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.”

— Nickole Brown, author of To Those Who Were Our First Gods

Jim Minick declaims, “This is how the Earth sings,” 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’d only care for it.”

— Todd Davis, author of Coffin Honey and Native Species

Throughout this collection, Jim Minick’s own bright song traces the tender fascination he has sustained for various winged creatures over his lifetime—what 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’s 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.

At the heart of this accessible and skillful collection, readers will appreciate Minick’s 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 “Mal and Slick’s Ballad,” Minick drills into the dangerous place of religion in all this damage we’ve 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 is a collection to read and reread to unlock its treasures.”

— Cathryn Hankla, author of Lost Places: On Losing and Finding Home

With a near-boundless affection for the overlooked and quotidian, The Intimacy of Spoons 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’s clear Jim Minick is a poet of generosity and kindness. By turns wistful, whimsical, and wise, this is a book I’ll be rereading for a long time to come. It’s a delight.”

— Doug Van Gundy, author of A Charm Against Forgetting

Here is a book that opens the kitchen drawer and finds a “mirror that fogs with breath” among the ladles. The Intimacy of Spoons shines its light into a

world made bright
by a creature who
knows dark

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 “with one ear,” he extends a hand to those who want to find their “way back into the earth.”

— Amy Wright, author of Paper Concert

In 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’s population of roughly 600 people. It remains the deadliest tornado in the history of Kansas.

Jim Minick’s nonfiction account, Without Warning, 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.

What Others Say

A time capsule of rural American lives and a testament to the tenacity and grit of the human spirit, Without Warning captures a community before, during, and after one of the most devastating natural disasters in our nation’s 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.”

— David Joy, author of When These Mountains Burn

Without Warning is a page-turning disaster narrative in the tradition of The Perfect Storm and Isaac’s Storm: 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’s best about our country confronts and overcomes the worst of our weather.”

— David Laskin, author of The Children’s Blizzard

Without Warning 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—a portrait of people and a town that lost almost everything but somehow found the strength to go on. It’s 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.”

— Holly Bailey, author of The Mercy of the Sky

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—the ding-ding, ding-ding of a railway crossing bell, lost photos found in a pasture ten miles away, a “mountainous grave” of debris. Twelve years of interviews and research accompany this work, allowing the author the time it takes to become familiar with people—in 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—from the book’s beginning to the wonderful epilogue that concludes it.”

— Joyce Dyer, author of Pursuing John Brown: On the Trail of a Radical Abolitionist

This is vivid, compelling narrative history with the detail, tension, and pacing of fiction, meaning it’s hard to put down. Though I’ve never been to Udall, Kansas, I feel as if I visited in 1955 and met the residents. Their stories are ones we’re 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?”

— David L. Bristow, author of Nebraska History Moments

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