The Book of Drought: Poems

In The Book of Drought, Rob Carney skips ahead to the ending, setting his unnamed Listen-Recorder in a near-future landscape newly wrecked by drought. Instead of water: dead lakebeds. Instead of wild animals: bones. The sky is now cloudless, and the city’s faucets are dry. No one has adjusted yet, but some gather in an empty river to grieve, remember, and to tell their stories, the stories that become this book. Part dystopian warning, part dry-humor protest, part mythology and song--get ready for some sad-mad beauty, but with open-eyed hope.

Winner of the 2023 X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, selected by Richard Blanco

ROB CARNEY is the author of eight previous books of poems, most recently Call and Response (Black Lawrence Press 2021) and The Book of Sharks (Black Lawrence 2018), which won the 15 Bytes Book Award. He is a recipient of the Milton Kessler Memorial Prize in Poetry, the Robinson Jeffers/Tor House Foundation Award for Poetry, and he has written a featured series called ＂Old Roads, New Stories＂ for the award-winning online journal Terrain.org for the last nine years. Carney has read his work on national public radio and at conferences, festivals, and universities across the country. Favorite drink: coffee. Favorite animal: the Great White. He is a Professor of English at Utah Valley University and lives in Salt Lake City.