More Space Than Anyone Can Stand

William Notter dares to be simple in most of these poems, free-verse as clean and pared-down as his subjects and landscapes, including Nebraska's emptiest county. I say "most" because the world of his imagination also includes the unclean stench of rendering plants, the gathering of roadkill, the terror of raped women; and the forms include three haiku and fine sestina. Notter writes of hard lives in poems that look deceptively simple.  —Robert Phillips 

"There is in Bill Notter's poetry and astonishing honesty that does not diminish the complexity of his vision. He is an American Poet—Midwestern, Western, and Southern. He is a realist and a great pleasure to read. This little book will increase in value as the years go by. What we have here is the onset of a major career." —James Whitehead

"More Space than Anyone Can Stand presents the reader with voices and scenes so authentically American that reading these we feel a sense of privilege and celebration. Bill Notter knows the dark side of our violences, our lusts, our stupidities, but he knows as well what makes us the industrious committed souls we are as well. A collection of portraits, yes, but the true characters are the landscapes of the Nebraska sandhills, the grasslands of the Plains, the Mississippi Delta, Arizona, and the West. These poems don't so much lift off the page as they burrow in to trouble us in the best sense, so we don't forget to question who we are as a people, and, for those of us who write, what it means to be an American poet." —Gray Jacobik, Series Judge

Bill Notter's focus is people: the laborers, clerks, sojourners who live around us, with us--the invisible ones we see and don't see at the same time. He sees them for us: the dead animal haulers, the flat busters, the bank cashier who vanished, the ex-cons, hitchhikers and cement finishers. Notter observes them, freezes them in portraits revealing their most intimate desires, wishes and needs, and graces them with the dignity of identify. The physical and psychological detail of this book is compelling, "like remembering the moment of birth, like watching the earth begin." —David Lee