Lowell Jaeger's Page

I teach creative writing at Flathead Valley Community College in Kalispell, Montana. I have poems forthcoming in The Iowa Review, Atlanta Review, The Coe Review, Poetry Flash, Georgetown Review, Big Muddy, Antioch Review, Louisiana Review, Pacific Review, Hawaii Review, Poetry East, and The California Quarterly. My first two collections of poems, War On War and Hope Against Hope, were published by Utah State University Press. My third collection, Suddenly Out of a Long Sleep, was published by Arctos Press in 2009, and my latest collection, WE was published in 2010 by Main Street Rag Publishing. Currently I serve as Editor of Many Voices Press which recently published New Poets of the American West, an anthology of poets from western states. I'm a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, winner of the Grolier Poetry Peace Prize and recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Montana Arts Council. I live in Yellow Bay with my wife, Amy, and our children, Bettreena, Jesseamyn, and Aamon.

WE (2010) Buy from publisher pub flyer	An Awakening It’s quiet as death. Till a renegade wolf in the dark scents his prey. Dances under starlight and howls a quarter mile away. Chills the forest a blacker black. You blink. Listen. Stare. The pulse of your empty house skips a beat. In the barn, the horses nicker and kick.   The mare is ready to foal. She’s sick with fear, panting, soaked in sweat. So you lace your boots and snipe out there toward the yawning ache of the hungriest need in you to face whatever prowls with cleft foot, claws, or Satan’s bark.   Just beyond the fence line you find the track. Yours are acres the wild wants back.   Published in South Dakota Review 2008
Suddenly, Out of a Long Sleep (2009) Buy on Amazon Pub Flyer
Hope Against Hope (1990) Buy on Amazon
War On War (1988) Buy on Amazon

I edited the popular book Poems Across the Big Sky: An Anthology of Montana Poets (2006), which is available on Amazon. I use the book as the basis for a talk I offer through the Humanities Montana Speakers Bureau about regional poetry and what Montana poets tell us about this place and the people who live here.

MCC crew reading poetry, Mt. Henry Lookout, YaakFriends ask me what I did last summer, and I tell them I worked for the Meaning of Service Project. It was my job to hike into the wild, track down a trail crew, sit with them in the middle of their workday…and read them a poem. This raises eyebrows. A poem? Indeed.

[from “Picks, Pulaskis, and Poems,” a short essay I wrote about working with the Montana Conservation Corps. Download here.