Where Rivers Change Direction

When you think of western poetry, you think of waddie mitchell...but the poetry of western life...this is it. One of the most eloquent, breathtaking books i have ever read... this man is in love with the land, and it shows in every word. Absolutely beautiful.
FAVORITE QUOTE: I walk out on the frozen

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ground, careful that the wind does not blow me east. I feel that insubstantial, and that elemental.

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Mark Spragg is a wonderful writer. His sense of place in the modern west of his native Wyoming is impeccably rendered. The trouble is, because these essays were written and printed elsewhere as separate pieces, that "place" thing is done over and over - the flora, the fauna, the rocks, the rivers

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and creeks, the cold, the wind, etc - to DEATH in fact. This very redundancy in the book dropped it from a five- to a four-star rating. The coming-of-age aspect of the story, Spragg maturing from a small boy to a middle-aged man who sees his parents divorce and his his own marriage fall apart, then watches his mother die a slow and painful death from emphysema, is handled like a master. You wanna read what it's like to to grow up out on the high plains near the end of the 20th century? Then this is a good place to start. Mark Spragg writes, in many ways, like a poet. His love of language is clear. WHERE THE RIVERS CHANGE DIRECTION is a darn fine book.

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I enjoyed the language of this book. It's reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy's descriptions of the West in All the Pretty Horses. I found it lacking in story line and trajectory. Each chapter is a snapshot of the narrator's life, and while each was interesting, I had hoped they would come together into

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some kind of resolution by the end. I suspect that the lack of resolution was intentional but as a reader I found it dissatisfying.

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This is an award winning book, but not for me. I found it to be a ponderous read and an overall downer. It consists of a series of mainly dark-themed essays. I read it only because it was recommended and loaned to me by a Wyoming resident. The setting for the book is Wyoming and that's the best

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thing it has going for it, in my humble opinion.

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