Dust Storms May Exist

Book excerpt: Dust Storms May Exist follows the trajectory of a 10,000-mile road trip, exploring the geography, music, and history of America while mapping its astonishments and disillusionments. Ben Groner III searches for a dead father, wrestles with belief and doubt, yearns for sensuality, and recalls the freedom and loneliness of traveling in South America. Bluegrass and cowboy songs seep across the pages as he moves through canyons, bayous, cornfields, museums, gas stations, dance halls, and memory’s refracting landscapes. These poems are a reckoning with what his country is and could be, a meditation on the palpability of absence, a discovery of the searing border between friendship and love, a realization that longing revolves at the core of all experience.