I’m excited to say that two of my new poems were published today on Fevers of the Mind. One is a memory from my childhood and the other is a Summer memory from a sweltering July evening in Idaho.
https://feversofthemind.com/2022/09/12/2-poems-from-william-peters/?s=09
We Had Our Reasons, by Ricardo Ruiz
(A Poetry Collection)
I will occasionally post my recommendations for new poetry publications and other writings. I’ll start with new books that I find regionally.
My findings may be late to the party of new books but I want to share some of my discoveries.
I’ll start with a poet in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, Ricardo Ruiz. He is the son of a migrant worker family in an Eastern Washington farming community. He was born in the United States, and his mother and father eventually gained legal resident status, while others in the community remained undocumented.
The source material for his poems are conversations he had with migrant worker families in his community. Some speak both Spanish and English, and others only speak Spanish. The book, We Had Our Reasons, is printed in both English and Spanish on alternating pages. Ruiz thinks of the book’s spine as the border between two countries.
Ruiz interviewed the people and the poems came from those conversations.
These poems are meant to be open conversations with others about an immigrant community’s experiences. Ruiz says, “It’s a start.”
We all need a way to start understanding one another. I like Ruiz’s approach using poetry. I’ve ordered my copy from Amazon.
#reading #poetry #immigrantfamilies
The Cricket
I was outside in the sunshine
And you somehow landed on
My black coat laid on the bench.
Without a thought
I reached down
Curled my middle finger
under my thumb,
And sent you tumbling through
The air with a power flick of my finger.
Thinking you would just
Shake yourself off and move on
You just lay on your side twitching.
When I touched you with my shoe tip –
nothing.
You died and I felt real sorrow.
I wanted you gone, not dead.
All you wanted
Was the warmth
Of my black jacket
On that cool
October day.
When we met
I thought
of myself
not
you.
FROM: Writing in Sand
I grew up in Kellogg, Idaho USA and attended Idaho State University and Boise State University. I was born of an immigrant father from Camborne, Cornwall, England and a mother who grew up in upstate New York. Three generations of my family and I worked for the Bunker Hill Company mine in the Silver Valley of the Coeur d’ Alenes in North Idaho. My family made mining a career, while I found summer employment that helped finance my college education. Bunker Hill was my working scholarship. I have worked as a teacher in public schools and a local community college, and as a bookseller. I live in Southeastern Idaho and continue to write.
This first published work is a collection of my poems from the last twenty-five years. At first, I kept writing without a goal of publishing. That kept me going for a long time–twenty-five years. Some of my early poems were about my immigrant father and his family from Cornwall, England coming to a mining community in North Idaho. I originally intended my early poems to be a tribute to my father’s entire mining career. To me, he was Superman without a cape. He was never more animated and energetic than when he was working on his ore train. He became a super charged younger man. But then, I fell in love with my craft. I wanted more and my writing grew.
Subsequent influences on my writing were the Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, and America’s Poet Laureate, Billy Collins. Neruda’s magic of transforming common household items, such as chairs, tables, plates, forks, and knives into objects of distinction and importance for his poetry subjects widened my lens for choosing subjects. I found narrative poems everywhere I looked in common items. Collins mesmerized me with his often-humorous narrative poetry. Common objects for him came to life with their own personalities and life lessons.
I’m excited about this publication of my first poetry collection. I look forward to promoting all things Poetry on this site. I hope you choose to return and learn with me. It will be a journey with a payload like my father’s ore train.
Writing in Sand 
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