Description:
A Secret History of the Nighttime World by Jason Ryberg takes the reader on a journey from city streets to wheat fields, navigating through a landscape bright with the "five-battery-flashlight of a moon."
Brief description: Jason Ryberg is the author of twelve books of poetry, six screenplays, a few short stories, several angry letters to various magazine and newspaper editors, and a box full of folders, notebooks and scraps of paper that could one day be (loosely) construed as a novel. He is currently an artist-in-residence at both The Prospero Institute of Disquieted P/o/e/t/i/c/s and the Osage Arts Community. He lives part-time in Kansas City, with a rooster named Little Red and a billy goat named Giuseppe, and part-time somewhere in the Ozarks, near the Gasconade River, where there are also many strange and wonderful woodland critters.
Review Quotes:
"A poet of witness, loaded up with bad radio and stale coffee, who slows down from a steady cross-country pace to survey the cultural wreckage." -George Wallace, author of Smashing Rock and Straight as Razors
"Jason Ryberg's imagery, as fresh as a midnight S curve, takes the reader on a journey from the city to the wheat fields through a landscape bright with the 'five-battery-flashlight of a moon.'" -Al Ortolani, author of Ghost Sign
"Beyond the reach of the new-Beats and city lits, Ryberg exists: his writing rattlesnake tough but also tender-hearted as the armored artichoke." -Kevin Rabas, Poet Laureate of Kansas (2017-2019)