Jim Dodge said he would consider publishing a volume of poetry if he lived to the millennium. Happily he did, and Rain on the River is the immediate result - work selected from his Tangram chapbooks, broadsides, and Solstice pieces, accompanied by three dozen new poems. If you've enjoyed his fiction, Dodge's first collection of poems and short prose offer similar pleasures: a splendid ear for language, great emotional range and subtlety, a sharp eye for the illuminating detail, and a sensibility that encompasses outright hilarity, savage wit, and tender marvel - all made eminently accessible through writing of uncompromising clarity and grace.

"This diverse, savvy, passionate selection of poems by novelist Jim Dodge contains lyric epigrams that go straight to the non-dualist bedrock, backwoods workers' dharma-combat humour, loving poems for wife and son, several high-spirited and near-transcendent poems of truth, sex and insight, some profound comments on dogs and salmon, a few vivid and pithy little prose pieces, and much else that defies description. His wide-ranging work is refined and accomplished with a sly sort of off-handedness. Poetry should be a pleasure, and Jim Dodge's work is just that: anyone who picks up this book has a treat in store."
Gary Snyder