River Under Ice
(Forthcoming - Summer 2027)
“Debra Nystrom is a rare blend of poet and master storyteller, skillfully weaving past and present, interior and exterior landscapes, ugliness and beauty, in a lyric voice that sometimes takes your breath away. The book is at once a gripping mystery and a brave exploration of childhood wounds and the unthinkable evil that creates them. It is also a tender love story about a brother, a man so gentle, funny, kind, humble, and remorseful, you fall for him instantly, a man who could deliver his own baby because “with all those calves he’d delivered, he knew what to do,” but who cannot deliver himself from the harm done to him by his own father. The particulars of Debra’s memoir are harrowing and haunting, but the way she presents them, inviting us to consider the phenomenon of memory and the protective nature of the human mind, makes her story universal. In saying what she can about the unsayable, Debra gives us permission to regard our own patchy, shadowed pasts, to feel our own losses, and to explore in that liminal space between remembering and not remembering what is painful in our pasts and also what is precious, ‘each of us with our remnants of story,’ as she says.”
—Jennifer Ackerman, author of nine books, including Chance in the House of Fate, The Genius of Birds, and What An Owl Knows
Night Sky Frequencies
“Debra Nystrom’s poems are like prairie grass bending in the wind... If you listen closely, beyond the hard-caked land, the parched air, and the oceanic loneliness, you will hear a harmonica playing. The night sky glistens with constellations. And something pure is being lifted out of nothingness.”
—Henri Cole, author of Gravity and Center, Blizzard, and Nothing to Declare
Bad River Road
“I so admire and am so moved by Debra Nystrom’s poetry that every new poem is a gift, and every book makes it necessary to stop whatever I’m doing, sit still, read, and be astonished by the world. Reading Bad River Road, I was living vicariously, trapped with trapped people in places they shouldn’t be. I finished many poems certain that what I’d just read was so strangely recognizable that the people and scenes were something I could go to my window and see. I love the exactness of the poems, and the indelible images, and also the way written and spoken words intrude. This is my favorite book by Debra Nystrom so far. It’s beautiful.”
—Ann Beattie, author of Onlookers, Park City, Where You’ll Find Me and many other works of fiction
Torn Sky
“Brilliance and sorrow: even when these poems wander from home, Torn Sky is haunted by the windy presence of the prairie: light-swept, fierce with bitter histories, an openness both bracing and aching. This is a book of deep conviction, alive with character and incident, richly peopled.”
—Mark Doty, National Book Award winning author of Deep Lane, Fire to Fire, Sweet Machine, Firebird
A Quarter Turn
“Debra Nystrom touches chords, with these intense, quiet, passionate poems, that are rarely touched so lucidly and with so little self-consciousness in contemporary American poetry—the chords of painful, and sometimes joyful, truths about ourselves, and ourselves with others. From a whole heart she has fashioned a whole book, a stunning and beautiful book.”
—Thomas Lux, author of To the Left of Time, God Particles, The Drowned River