Description

Paul Dry Books, paperback

Publication Date: February 7, 2023

Publisher Marketing: From the view out his apartment window on Tenth street in Manhattan, Robert Dreesen looks westward and back in time to his boyhood and youth in a place in “Northeastern Nebraska alongside/US Highway 81 just across the river/from Yankton, South Dakota,” a real place that takes on the poignancy of myth in I Don’t Smoke Enough to Quit: An Epic of Diminished Proportions.

Written in unrhymed fourteen-line stanzas of more or less iambic pentameter, Dreesen’s telling of the lives of Rose and Kenny (his mother and father) and his siblings and himself has no bad guys; no one is despised; no one is envied. Supported, more or less, by the proceeds from their bar, the Lazy D Saloon, the family makes its way. Robert Dreesen brings to this recollection of his growing up an attentive musical ear and an appreciation of the variousness of his life.

For more than fifteen years, Dreesen has been an acquiring editor at Cambridge University Press in New York City. He has not turned his back on his boyhood in rural Nebraska. Readers will happily join him to experience a life where family is a bounty and the world is rich with horses, dogs, fights, drunks, imagined visits from poet-sages, insufficient money (but not poverty), siblings, honor, booze, and the Missouri River.