B.J. Omanson’s poems in this issue are from a collection of poems about the Spoon River valley in Illinois where he was raised. Other poems from this collection have appeared in The Hudson Review, The Sewanee Review, Shenandoah & elsewhere. Most recently he wrote the annotations for the poems of a “lost” WWI poet whom he rediscovered, John Allan Wyeth, whose book of poems, This Man’s Army: A War in Fifty-odd Sonnets was republished by the University of South Carolina Press in 2008, with an introduction by Dana Gioia. Omanson’s current project, Where the River Darkens: An Experiment in Autobiography & Poetry, can be seen at http://forgottenstair.wordpress.com.
