Ryler Dustin, Trailer Park Psalms - Poetry

Trailer Park Psalms follows the speaker beyond his boyhood trailer park, through an America marked by violence—from a gas line explosion to the scars of war and colonialism. Along the way, he finds sources of awe to sustain us: Voyager spacecrafts, romantic love, and the "clumsy kindness" of family mending the past.

“Ryler Dustin’s poems achieve a clear and accessible quality, not through the simplicity of idea or emotion (for his poems are rich with surprising language and complex sentiment) but through his remarkable facility with syntax. Indeed, his elegant sentences convey feeling with vulnerability and sensitivity, while achieving what can only be called pure music. The ingenious metaphors in Trailer Park Psalms manage to contain the contradictory and conflicting emotions that come with loss, nostalgia, humor, and the effort to cope with the wounds of a complicated personal history.”

—Kwame Dawes, author of UnHistory with John Kinsella 

Ryler Dustin is the author of Heavy Lead Birdsong from Write Bloody Publishing, and his new collection, Trailer Park Psalms, was selected for the University of Pittsburgh Press's Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. He represented Seattle on the final stage of the Individual World Poetry Slam, and his poems appear in outlets like American Life in Poetry, Verse Daily, Gulf Coast, and The Best of Button Poetry. He holds an MFA from the University of Houston and a PhD from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and recently moved back to Bellingham after living in Spain, Michigan, Jack Kerouac's former home, and an off-grid cabin in Oregon's Rogue River Valley.

Ryler will also join us earlier in the day at noon to teach a poetry workshop! Click here for more details.