“An unexpected story and a gem of a book.”
—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

 

The incomparable Campbell McGrath, whom Outside magazine calls, “A writer who could help save poetry from academia and get the rest of us reading it again,” delivers an astounding work: Shannon, an epic poem that traces the remarkable journey of the youngest member of the Lewis and Clark expedition. The Kansas City Star praises Shannon as, “A luminescent narrative…a myth of American character before its corruption,” and Campbell McGrath—Poet Laureate, Guggenheim Fellowship, Pushcart Prize, and three-time Academy of American Poets Prize winner—proves once again to be truly an “everyman poet” who channels the spirit of Walt Whitman in this lyrical adventure.

Who finds this body
Be it known
My name is George Shannon
& I bequeath my remains
To seed this land
With American bones.

From the inimitable Campbell McGrath comes an epic poem of George Shannon, the youngest member of the Lewis and Clark expedition, who wandered the prairie alone for sixteen days. Spinning a tale of adventure and wonderment, McGrath gives voice to Shannon's lost weeks in the wilderness, a harrowing journey of survival and discovery.

With Shannon, McGrath has created both a thrilling narrative that rises from the once vast, lonely spaces of the American west and a compelling portrait of that now ineradicably altered landscape?then unmapped, wild yet bounteous, teeming with buffalo and home to native peoples?that continues to haunt the American imagination.

"A meditation on a new, westering nation's discovery of its own inestimable riches....Surely, the sort of task McGrath undertakes here represents one of literature's profoundest pleasures. A poet tirelessly digs up something buried by days, years, centuries. And then he holds it to the light."