Pulley Press Announces “A Man with A Rake,” a Collection of Poems by Pulitzer-prize Winning Poet Ted Kooser

SEATTLE—

Pulley Press, a new poetry imprint of Clyde Hill Publishing, is publishing its first chapbook, A Man with A Rake, a collection of poems by Pulitzer-prize winning poet Ted Kooser. The book will be released on March 15, 2022. 

With this beautiful set of eighteen poems by Kooser, Pulley Press is charting its course to celebrate poetry from the rural interior of America. A Man with a Rake is an auspicious launch– Kooser, in his eighties now,  is a master of American letters (winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and twice the US Poet Laureate), and he’s well-known for his poems about life in the middle of the country. 

However, though he writes about farms and barns and fields and kitchens, Kooser isn’t embroidering nostalgic cliches or quaint memes of farm life. Instead, his poems wryly overturn these easy images and create fresh, surprising images from what some might perceive is a quiet life in Nebraska. 

A Man with A Rake is for people who love poetry that is a pleasure to read. It’s for readers who like being transported to rural landscapes– to farms and sheds full of antique tools and hay forks, to stretches of wheat fields, warehouses, poultry houses and lonely gas stations. This book will thrill  Kooser fans and poetry collectors who want a slender, beautiful chapbook that they can savor in one sitting. People who love Jim Harrison and books about How-to-build-a-shed will love this, as well as people who would rather read than rake a pile of leaves. 

Poet and critic Ed Hirsch wrote in The Washington Post that there is a “quiet amazement at the core of all Kooser’s work.” His verse is “an unadorned, pragmatic, quintessentially American poetry of empty places, of farmland and low-slung cities…” 

Ted Kooser served two terms as US Poet Laureate and won the Pulitzer Prize for Delights & Shadows in 2004. The poet lives and writes on 62 acres of wooded hills and pasture in rural Nebraska. For many years Kooser worked at a desk in the life insurance business and then, after he retired he taught poetry writing at the University of Nebraska.

He is the author of fifteen books of poetry, five volumes of nonfiction, five children’s picture books, and seventeen chapbooks and special editions.  He served two terms as U.S. Poet Laureate and his 2004 collection of poems, Delights & Shadows, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.  Prior to the publication of A Man with a Rake, his most recent collection of poems is Red Stilts, from Copper Canyon Press. More about his life, his work, and his many honors can be found at www.tedkooser.net. 

Pulley Press founding Editor, Frances McCue, says “Imagine Ted Kooser’s pages pinned across a sleek, steel wire with whirring pulleys on either end, zipping the poems from his home in Nebraska to the Pulley Press offices in the urban Northwest. Or, better yet, think of these poems sent from Ted’s earth to yours, from poet to readers, from the interior of the country, to points far off. 

Pulley will follow with two more books in 2022: a collection of poems by former Cherokee chief Wilma Mankiller and a volume of poems by Ricardo Ruiz, a poet from Eastern Washington’s farming community. 

“Each volume brings us into a place far outside the poetry apparatus of America’s big cities and coastlines,” says McCue. “Pulley Press is interested in the images, psychology, music and artistry of poets working from places too often overlooked in our literary landscape.”

For questions or more information please contact Frances McCue: frances@pulleypress.com, 206-931-3779. Learn more about Pulley Press on www.pulleypress.com.