ABOUT CRAIG CHALLENDER
Craig Challender teaches American literature and creative writing at Longwood University in Farmville, Virginia, where he also directs the Longwood College Authors Series. His first full-length collection, Familiar Things (Linwood Publishers) has been critically acclaimed by Prairie Schooner and Northweast; his poems and reviews have frequently appeared or are forthcoming in South Dakota Review, Connecticut Review, Tar River Poetry, The Midwest Quarterly, The Paterson Literary Review and Chelsea.
Dancing on Water
Craig Challender
"Dancing and music permeate Craig Challender’s important new collection, Dancing on Water. Fatherhood and family life lie at the center of this book where home life is not a burden, but a complex source of joy. Revealing a willingness to love even those who cannot be claimed as blood kin, lyrical poems about adopting two daughters, and the birth of another provide epiphanic moments of affirmation. Never compromising tenderness, Challender does not exploit the heart, knowing that real dancers dance alone, even in love. Transporting us from everyday experience, Challender binds us to his world by sensual detail while he plays cards or passes a burlap wrapped jug back and forth with his father. Deeply rooted in place, his poems detail the Chickasaw National Recreation Area, Outer Banks, the death of a lone swimmer in Lake Lakota, and drinking Blatz beer at a bowling alley in South Dakota. Because the poems refuse to let passion and laughter get swallowed up by dailiness, Dancing on Water stays lodged in our minds, anchored in our hearts, reminding us why we need to dance, even in a world that threatens to drown our songs."
—Vivian Shipley
Lone Swimmer
Labor Day weekend on Lake Lakota:
a soft thffft as metal meets flesh,
then hard sound of bone that gags motor,
owner of the Dakota Diamond as blood slicks
and John Chance slips from sight.
The poor bastard worked like hell
for what he got, even death:
wife, kid, Ph.D., flat gut.
Bluecollar dean in a prairie town,
he devised Gen Ed for goat-ropers,
read R.D. Laing, made
end runs at his secretary, showed
his midlife poems to the English chair.
His star grew darker. Jogging nights,
alone, in black sweats, he’d lose it
in folds of sky and earth. Mornings-after
board meetings his legs felt thick
as foundry smoke while he stared through polyester
at his father eating coal for breakfast, heard
Soft, that’s you. Fat fuckin
Chance, saw the Superficial. C+
on his senior thesis. Six months
at Podunk U. the faculty word was lightweight,
he was No Chance in the student senate.
Jocks called him The Prairie Prick.
Running never made him hard enough.
Besides, he never got that high runners
are supposed to get, just jogger’s knees.
He started swimming in the lake outside town.
No buddy system, just himself
one mile across the deepest part.
Something in the push of wave against his chest,
the way his hands and head cut scum,
fish-smell, those gasping drinks of air . . .
The way down is soft. He waves at carp
and webs of moss, makes undertones. His body
knows what hit him, knows too
how hard they’ll have to work to drag past
this dark pull, fish him up.
Copyright © Pecan
Grove Press,
1997-2003
For further information contact
H. Palmer
Hall.
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Most recent revision
November 11, 2003
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