Trailer Park Psalms

Trailer Park Psalms traces the speaker’s journey beyond his boyhood trailer park, through an American landscape marked by violence—from a gas line explosion in his hometown to his father’s war memories to the scars of colonialism inscribed in place, language, and ecology. Along the way, he searches for sources of awe that might inspire us, even in a compromised world: the everyday miracle of eyesight, the courage of the Voyager spacecrafts, and the “clumsy kindness” of family members trying to mend the damages of the past. In the end, what he finds isn’t faith but the hope that “if there’s a heaven, we will bend / to examine our old selves / and wonder how something so delicate / was ever allowed.”

More Praise

Although the poems in Trailer Park Psalms range widely (from a hardscrabble trailer park in the Pacific Northwest to London to the very edge of our galaxy), they are united by Ryler Dustin’s fine intelligence and his mastery of image and tone. These poems meditate on the persistence of memory, the difficulties of love, and the curiosities of ecology with real clarity, always offering us voyages toward knowledge, awe, and an invigorated sense of self.

Kevin Prufer, author of The Art of Fiction: Poems

The poems in Ryler Dustin’s Trailer Park Psalms radiate with ache, pull us toward the awe of memory and love and the holy ringing only a body can make. If Dustin is right, and ‘love . . . means to make a space for this wrecked world inside us,’ then this collection is a profound act of love, offering the wrecked world inside us a tender home, an exquisite language with which to make itself known.

Stacey Waite, author of Butch Geography

Word by word, Ryler Dustin creates a world, complete with its ditches and flames and warnings, as well as the lovers and friends and family who walk briefly through it. These are poems of love and ferocious need, and what is loved is all-encompassing, from a stolen cigarette to a wayward star. This is a voice from an American wilderness, one that has echoes of Whitman, in its largeness and its heart.

Nick Flynn, author of I Will Destroy You

What I have loved about Ryler Dustin’s poems since I first heard him read them in Bellingham, Washington, back in 2007, is the way they are offered with a gentle quiet that gives way to the quiet in me. The poems in this collection are no different; how his reflections on memory and place within the Pacific Northwest call to how we fit in the worlds that surround us, similar as how a walk in the forest allows us to join the conversation of silence that passes between the trees.

Anis Mogjani, poet laureate of Oregon and two-time Individual National Poetry Slam champion

There’s a rural charm and sense of danger lurking in Trailer Park Psalms, but it is exactly the perpetual threat of poverty and violence that make the pieces sing.

Adriana E. Ramírez, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

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