DUST STORMS MAY EXIST (Madville Publishing, May 21, 2024)

Praise for Dust Storms May Exist

“Vastness in all its forms—sky, land, time, ache, faith, even language itself—is at the heart of Ben Groner’s first collection, Dust Storms May Exist. From Bolivia to Chile, from Cana to Capernaum—and with so much “shimmering and shifting / around us”—Groner asks, “Where can one ground oneself?” Maybe there’s no comforting, enveloping answer but, instead, only this radiant life where strangers—all sons and daughters—sometimes find themselves in shared spaces, marveling, attuned to the same mysteries where “so much can happen” and where “the dead are always with us.” “One language can’t tell the whole story,” Groner says; and whether that story is personal or communal, local or global, momentary or eternal, perhaps all we can do is to trust “that what we see is being / held together, invisibly.” Fortunately for us, Groner’s poems reveal at least a glimpse of the shimmering, precarious, ecstatic proof.”

— Jeff Hardin, author of A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being

“Ben Groner III writes the kind of poetry that makes you stop and stare—at its beauty, yes, but also at the small, incandescent details to which it calls your attention. In Dust Storms May Exist, a paper-clip burn becomes a meditation on friendship, bodily ailments open space for contemplating landscapes and travel, and the simple gesture of stepping aside on a canyon trail morphs into a conversation about life’s endless inventories of chance. This is a stunner of a book, one that created the quietest of spaces where I could immerse myself in Groner’s many sojourns across exquisite terrains made even more so by his unwavering curiosity, his keen ear, and his reverent wonder. I’m grateful for poems and poets like this. I’m grateful for the reminder to slow down, to take notice, and as the final words of the book suggest, to step into my own life.”

— Destiny O. Birdsong, author of Negotiations and Nobody’s Magic

“Ben Groner III’s first collection of poems takes readers across the country and offers them a vision of an America worth embracing. In places like Hopkinsville, KY, Northern Mississippi, New Mexico, New Orleans, Toledo, Tucson, and beyond to the coastlines, we find people engaged in luminous daily life with homegrown geniuses like Faulkner and Lead Belly as backdrop and soundtrack. Dust Storms May Exist is a powerful book of odes and elegies, reflections on a father gone too soon and a country seemingly unraveling, like the “Untied States” on a sign remembered from a road trip. Groner recognizes moments of revelation [...] These are poems of travel and exploration, weathering storms of many kinds along the journey, always delivering a sense of rich and meaningful arrival.”

— Jesse Graves, author of Merciful Days and Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine

“Dust Storms May Exist is a stunning collection “drenched in gladness” and gorgeous imagery, striking that delicate balance between beauty and ache at the seam of each poem. Ben Groner III is a poet who pierces each moment with reverence and brilliant examinations of the human spirit searching through pastoral landscapes and histories for deep empathy and connection. A sense of awe travels throughout these poems as the speaker travels around the world “stunned into silence and stillness.” These are poems abounding with faith, family, masterful closures, and exquisite lines like “A night heron rises from the river like a memory / about to return….” This book continually held my attention and my heart.”

— Tiana Clark, author of I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood

“What a map toward hope Ben Groner III offers in Dust Storms May Exist. Drifting between travelogue, confession, elegy, and ode, these poems scour mythic American landscapes for anything enduring and true. Here live muttering quail, mosquitoes torqued as pumpjacks, patchy alfalfa, fog scarfing fir trees—even grime on a concrete overpass is held, witnessed, sung into record. Groner, the seeker, hands us vignettes where the cosmic meets the commonplace, where loss and discovery converge into one message, a single destination in this enormous world full of souls: advance.”

— Allison Adair, author of The Clearing

“Ben Groner’s poems often begin in observation, and often the place seems new to the poet as well as his readers. With wry humor and lyric patience, Groner invites us into the acutely alert and sensitive space of a true traveler, one whose canny, generous eye and ear lead us into revelatory explorations, not only of place, but of the true conditions of his life, those close to him, and our lives as well.”

— Jeff Gundy, author of Wind Farm

“With unrelenting awe, Ben Groner keeps “an eye to a viewfinder,” patiently waiting, sure that revelation will come in the form of the “solitary hawk wheeling in the ephemeral dusk” or “particles of the sinking sun sifting/warmly through kitchen windows.” Drawing from his childhood in Mississippi, the depths of loss, and the liberating landscapes of the American West and South America, Groner’s flickering poems are elegies for every fleeting moment, recording what has changed and what endures “beyond the scar, the heat, the flame, / the momentary spark.”

— Elizabeth Hughey, author of White Bull

“In the engagingly varied poems of Dust Storms May Exist, Ben Groner III invites himself to remember, invites us to revel with him in the moments, the landscapes, the surprises in a life closely observed. “I’m not asking for revelation,” he asserts. “I don’t need to be taken anywhere.” Paradoxically, his poems take us on a wide-ranging journey—from the concrete overpass and vacant railyard that open “Inventory of Pit Stops” to the street art of Valparaíso, Chile. Groner has an eye for the revelatory in small things. “For now,” he says, “I want to live in that instant just before the sun / peeks out from behind the moon, and again floods the day with light.” Open this collection to any page. Share in Ben Groner’s wonder.”

— David Meischen, author of Anyone’s Son

“Ben Groner III’s whirlwind debut, Dust Storms May Exist, transports the speaker and reader across cities, countries, histories, and relationships—these are travel poems, if by “travel” one can mean insistent looking and revelation. However, it’s not what the speaker sees that unites the collection—rather, it’s the way he looks beneath and before and after what is in front of him to more fully see himself. Here is a speaker who can enter a foreign space and reach for the other to say, “I’m just as lost / inchoate, feeble, bewildered as you. / Just as thrumming, as resplendent.” This is a book for anyone who wishes to do more than glance in foreign cities, anyone who has been in the C Boarding Group. Wherever you are going, take this book with you, and pick up where Groner leaves off.”

— Lily Greenberg, author of In the Shape of a Woman

“In Ben Groner III’s debut poetry collection, he asks, “Have you discovered a hidden key that unlocks joy?” Yes, an absolute yes, these poems, which are an amalgamation of landscapes, people, and sensory insights; is that key [...] Groner is an expert in the interrogative, leaving readers with questions that linger on the tongue like, “Can one distinguish between yearning and loneliness / and love, or do they each taste the same,” and “Harm or harmony—toward which will religion swerve?” Groner guides us [...] through an inventory of pit stops that unearth revelations, ruminations, and superb scenes of the South. Open up this book, this key, this poetic map—and see what unlocks within yourself.”

— Joshua Nguyen, author of Come Clean