Using family photographs from the last century, Afterimage moves from the southern to northern Plains and the eastern Midwest, where the natural world calls out through open fields and dark woods, then through transient moments framed by gardens: a butterfly nectaring on a coneflower, planting lavender with his future wife, or autumn leaves crashing against a morning window. In a rich array of forms and evocative imagery, the poems in Afterimage reach through prairie history until grass becomes skin, and light becomes shadow. Afterimage is an unsentimental but heartfelt elegy for the landscape and the people of the twentieth-century Midwest. The poems preserve the lost place, the lost time, and lost inhabitants, but Benjamin Vogt also celebrates the earth's own ability to flower and return, with human assistance and without. These firm and carefully measured poems are a thoughtful delight, one that should not be missed. -- Andrew Hudgins Benjamin Vogt's rich, transporting gift is to see deeply, generously considering moments and scenes that preceded and sustain the lives we know, to dig curiously and calmly, alert for clues and remnants--to harvest more than any seed promised. -- Naomi Shihab Nye BENJAMIN VOGT was born in Oklahoma and grew up in Minnesota. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and an M.F.A from The Ohio State University. His poetry and creative nonfiction have appeared in American Life in Poetry, Crab Orchard Review, ISLE, Orion, Sou'wester, Subtropics , The Sun , and Verse Daily . Benjamin is also the author of two poetry chapbooks: Indelible Marks (Pudding House) and Without Such Absence (Finishing Line Press). Visit him at monarchgard.com. Used Book in Good Condition