Events

Skiing with Dostoyevsky: New & Selected Poems gathers lyrics whose worldliness is rooted in both travel and “the lexicon of the local,” in which “Winter is going to / prove whatever it has to prove / as I intend to spend what I provisioned / giving away all I have left to give.”

The book brings together pieces from David Axelrod’s previous nine collections along with thirty-two brilliant new poems, the whole a kind of symphonic effort to clarify the unity of consciousness, water, wind, and stone, all life, in fact, and the planet itself.

“At his best, the lives inhabiting the poems of David Axelrod are often those of people, earthy or urban, easily overlooked if not forgotten. Folks we might call "working class" as a euphemism for "down on their luck" or "simple." But simple by whose measure, and whose idea of what constitutes a proper kind of luck? I love this proclivity in the poet's reflections. Even better, in this collection of new and previously published poems, Axelrod absolutely is "at his best" by any measure I can think of.”

— Chris La Tray, Montana Poet Laureate and author of Becoming Little Shell: A Landless Indian’s Journey Home

David Axelrod teaches letterpress printing at the University of Montana on a 1935 Hacker Test Press and founded Bear Scratch Press. In addition to the volumes selected from here, Axelrod has published two collections of personal essays, most recently, The Eclipse I Call Father. He lives in a former gravel pit where he has a small native plants nursery.

Visit David Axelrod’s website.