Mark Sanders
Selected Books
Before We Lost Our Ways (Hurakan Press, 1996) is Sanders's first full-length collection of poetry. Availability through private sources is limited. Sanders's poems embrace the diverse worlds from which he has grown--the Great Plains and the geographies of family, history, and loss.
"I have envied Mark Sanders the ability to say exactly what needs to be said then stop. . . . The poems in this volume are not easy poems: they are the blood and guts of a poet who knows art is important to this life." - JIM BARNES, Chariton Review.
"Mark Sanders holds nothing back; his poems transect an impressive gamut of attitudes, themes, and emotions." - William Kloefkorn, Nebraska State Poet.
Here in the Big Empty (Backwaters Press, 2006) is Sanders's second full-length collection.
"Here in the Big Empty is a marvelous collection, rich with image, meaning, music. The poems even smell of the Plains (which are not empty, which are as chockful of life, human and otherwise, as anywhere in these United States). I am smarter for having read them. . . ." -Kelly Cherry, author of History, Passion, Freedom, Death, and Hope.
"'Plain speech for a plain people,' Mark Sanders writes in the opening poem of Here in the Big Empty, and that's exactly what his powerful and moving new book offers." -Ronald Wallace, author of Long for This World: New and Selected Poems.
Conditions of Grace collects the best of Sanders's poetry from more than a 30-year career, incorporating work from his other full collections and numerous chapbooks.
"This poet is of the same important tribe as Ted Kooser and Jo McDougall, Dave Etter and Jim Barnes, in tune with a type of Midwestern and democratic rhetoric. . . ." -David Baker, poetry editor of Kenyon Review.
"Mark Sanders is a keen observer, a careful translator of experience and archivist of the actual. . . . His poems are deft and significant, and I'm betting most readers who find their way to this book will not be eager to find their way out." - R. T. Smith, editor of Shenandoah.
Fine Press Book
In 2013, LaNana Creek Press and book artisan Charles D. Jones printed a limited fine-press edition of Landscapes, with Horses in both a deluxe boxed set and a standard hand-bound edition. This book was expanded in 2018 as a trade edition by Stephen F. Austin State University Press. The book contains Sanders's poetry about horses and is accompanied by Jones's exquisite woodcut artistry.
FORTHCOMING
For Fall 2019, a new anthology, edited by Mark Sanders, will appear from Sandhills Press. Verdigris Creek Bridge: A Literary Reunion will be a collection of poets and writers who comprise the literary community to which Mark Sanders belongs.
RIDDLED WITH LIGHT: METAPHOR IN THE POETRY OF W. B. YEATS
(Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2014)
The certain good of Yeats' metaphors, the labor of the poetic process, the curse and blessing of the poetic dance let us cling to all the fine things: how art and nature are inseparable; how art keeps us pursuing answers to our existential riddle; and how, ultimately, we rise, because of art, from our dark caverns of light. (from the back cover of Riddled with Light.)
"Sanders shows us Yeats anew, laboring on his visionary engine to produce a profoundly metaphoric poetry and a poetics that enfranchises and empowers his audience by making that audience both a respondent and, more important, an active co-creator." Stephen C. Behrendt, from the Introduction.
THE WEIGHT OF THE WEATHER: REGARDING THE POETRY OF TED KOOSER
(Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2018)
​
Winner of the 2018 NEBRASKA BOOK AWARD for non-fiction/biography!
​
The Weight of the Weather: Regarding the Poetry of Ted Kooser is a comprehensive examination of the former U.S. Poet Laureate’s long-time contribution to American letters. For many years, Kooser’s work, while well-regarded among regional audiences in the Midwest and Great Plains, had been considered quaint and provincial by readers elsewhere. This attitude largely changed circa 1980 with the publication of Sure Signs: New and Selected Poems, when Kooser’s work began to receive national readership which, in turn, led to his appointment as U.S. Poet Laureate.
In this new critical study, Mark Sanders, a long-time critic, publisher, and supporter of Great Plains poetry, compiles an overview of Kooser’s poetic legacy. The Weight of the Weather gathers criticisms, book reviews, reflections, and interviews that span Kooser’s long poetic career, including work by a number of critics and fellow poets—Dana Gioia, David Baker, and Jonathan Holden among them. Kooser’s work is universally American, deeply ingrained in the poetic traditions of Whitman, Frost, Williams, Stafford, and Stevens.
​
​
​
LANDSCAPES, WITH HORSES
(Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2018)
​
Winner of the 2019 Western Heritage Award for Outstanding Book of Poetry.
​
Winner of the 2019 Poetry Honor Nebraska Book Award.
​
Landscapes, with Horses conjoins the work of two artists: the poetry of Mark Sanders and the illustrations of woodcutter and book artisan Charles Jones. The book is introduced by Northwest novelist and story-writer Claire Davis, herself a horse enthusiast. Both Sanders and Jones offer essays that highlight for readers the significance of this poetry/art book.
In 2013, Sanders and Jones collaborated on a hand-pressed, hand-bound book limited to 36 copies; the book was published on Jones's LaNana Creek imprint. That original work featured over a dozen of Jones’s exquisite woodcuts and twenty of Sanders’s poems; contained in a clam shell case, the book was also released with original prints, suitable for framing. The result was a feast of imagery, both visual and written, but targeting fine-press book collectors and enthusiasts.
This 2018 trade edition expands the number of poems included among Sanders's selections while retaining Jones's woodcuts. The trade volume, of course, is far more affordable.
Jones’s woodcuts show a range of horse energies, from wildness to repose, and Sanders’s verse places horses and humans in spiritual and emotional proximity in such fashion that acclaimed poet and novelist, Kelly Cherry, once called Sanders the best horse poet since Virginia poet Henry Taylor.
Landscapes, with Horses is an intimate collection; readers will understand both the artist and the poet better for reading the work, but readers will also see themselves transcended into the varied, powerful landscapes this book brings to life.
​
A SANDHILLS READER: THIRTY YEARS OF GREAT WRITING FROM THE GREAT PLAINS (Stephen F. Austin State UP, 2015)
​
Winner of the 2016 Nebraska Book Award for Anthology
​
A Sandhills Reader: 30 Years of Great Writing from the Great Plains is a retrospective anthology of some of the best work published by Sandhills Press, a Nebraska-based small press concern for literature, between 1979 and 2009.
The anthology collects poems, criticism, and creative prose from such authors as David Baker, Hilda Raz, Ted Kooser, Barton Sutter, William Kloefkorn, Twyla Hansen, Ronald Wallace, Kelly Cherry, Dana Gioia, Greg Kuzma, Don Welch, Kathleene West, Jonathan Holden, Greg Kosmicki, and numerous others. In the thirty years that Sandhills Press published, the imprint promoted the works of new and established writers and helped to define what Great Plains poetry was all about.
In addition to the selected works, many of the writers included provide commentary and literary memoirs about Sandhills Press and what the press meant to them and to their aesthetic.
​
THE RED BOOK: THE SELECTED POEMS OF KATHLEENE WEST (Stephen F. Austin State UP, 2017)
​
Shortly before her death in July 2015, Kathleene West asked Mark Sanders to be the literary executor of her poetry; she asked that he edit her Selected Poems, and in her last writings noted to her executor, Kitty McCord, that she hoped it would be titled The Red Book. Fulfilling his promise to West, whose work he published often on his Sandhills Press imprint, The Red Book was published in 2017.
​
IN A GOOD TIME: POEMS
In a Good Time: Poems is Mark Sanders's most recent title. Published by WSC Press (Wayne State College) in September 2019 in conjunction with a reading tour of two Great Plains states, the book is a collection of new poems, all composed between 2014 and 2019. The book has been nominated for several poetry awards already.
​
​
Or, order directly from the publisher: https://wscpress.com/2339/features/in-a-good-time-by-mark-sanders/
WHY GUINEAS FLY: STORIES
(This manuscript is in-progress and soon to seek a publisher)
​
A native of the Great Plains, Sanders captures well what it is to live and survive the harsh territory of America’s flatlands. Unlike his literary forebears, however, writers such as Willa Cather, Mari Sandoz, and Wright Morris, Sanders does not romanticize—as Cather or Sandoz often did—the Plains experience; nor does he disengage his characters, in the manner of Morris, from the emotional weather straining to engulf them or to blow them off the earth’s face. The grotesque place of Sanders’s world places his people deep in the drought, the deluge, the erosion, and—even if they should fail—they go out scraping and scrapping. This is fiction that sees stubbornness as a virtue, ugly and mean as such virtue may be.
