LANDSCAPE DAD_SHOP.png
LANDSCAPE DAD_SHOP.png

Landscape, Dad!

$15.99 $16.99

Christopher Klingbeil connects nature and the self in a debut collection of poems, Landscape Dad! A panorama of the Western United States: setting in motion sunlight, snow, frost, wind, rippled roadways, plumes of dust in every value of light and color. Humanity’s irrefutable connection with the earth, in its many states, is celebrated in this collection that awes and humbles with exactitude. Poems within have been nominated for Best of the Net, featured in Denver Quarterly, Painted Bride Quarterly, and other journals.

I want a poem to make me happy

“at night when the light cuts coral in the foothills. when the old peaks above the mountains mandible ribbons into clouds. mawing, mawing, it's a pretty drive with my quiet son. on the shoulders of twin seasons when we’re driving home from school. the sepia air is a bath holding what we didn't speak about passing. I want a poem to make me happy. if these landscape things of such great futility and worried-over lightness are about to continue. if this is how we waste it. if the excavations of put-out bones unveil belief in something higher up, I want a poem to make me happy. beyond these stars. we punched-through lights. we put a mobile dome above the mountains we painted with blue tape in the shapes of triangles in the new room we're building for your brother. the hacksaw bits half-spun to stone to cut and lay the patterns to the floor still need retrieving. when it's all a bit receding. I want a poem to make me happy if two hundred million years of lizards was not enough. some hundred thousand moments of ourselves will only smudge against this flashlight clocking at the hip of someone walking toward us in the dark. I’ll take another happy poem if another star becomes enveloped by this news of a second star. the radio confirms what we have all been observing, but without the words. I want a poem to make me happy when the poem isn’t happy. we can have our entire lives. to make a poem happy is the cost of all our lives. take note together. we won’t be like this here again – right in this space between two stars – for all our lives”

ISBN-13: 979-8-9987727-6-4

104pgs, 5.5” x 8.5”

Edited by Caterina Alvarez

Cover design by Josh Dale

Cover photograph: “Scenic View of Montana's Mountains Across the Valley Plains” © 2025 GUMMYBONE

Preorder now. Releases on January 22nd, 2027.

For international orders greater than 2 units: please email us before ordering so we can calculate shipping, thanks!

Christopher Klingbeil connects nature and the self in a debut collection of poems, Landscape Dad! A panorama of the Western United States: setting in motion sunlight, snow, frost, wind, rippled roadways, plumes of dust in every value of light and color. Humanity’s irrefutable connection with the earth, in its many states, is celebrated in this collection that awes and humbles with exactitude. Poems within have been nominated for Best of the Net, featured in Denver Quarterly, Painted Bride Quarterly, and other journals.

I want a poem to make me happy

“at night when the light cuts coral in the foothills. when the old peaks above the mountains mandible ribbons into clouds. mawing, mawing, it's a pretty drive with my quiet son. on the shoulders of twin seasons when we’re driving home from school. the sepia air is a bath holding what we didn't speak about passing. I want a poem to make me happy. if these landscape things of such great futility and worried-over lightness are about to continue. if this is how we waste it. if the excavations of put-out bones unveil belief in something higher up, I want a poem to make me happy. beyond these stars. we punched-through lights. we put a mobile dome above the mountains we painted with blue tape in the shapes of triangles in the new room we're building for your brother. the hacksaw bits half-spun to stone to cut and lay the patterns to the floor still need retrieving. when it's all a bit receding. I want a poem to make me happy if two hundred million years of lizards was not enough. some hundred thousand moments of ourselves will only smudge against this flashlight clocking at the hip of someone walking toward us in the dark. I’ll take another happy poem if another star becomes enveloped by this news of a second star. the radio confirms what we have all been observing, but without the words. I want a poem to make me happy when the poem isn’t happy. we can have our entire lives. to make a poem happy is the cost of all our lives. take note together. we won’t be like this here again – right in this space between two stars – for all our lives”

ISBN-13: 979-8-9987727-6-4

104pgs, 5.5” x 8.5”

Edited by Caterina Alvarez

Cover design by Josh Dale

Cover photograph: “Scenic View of Montana's Mountains Across the Valley Plains” © 2025 GUMMYBONE

Preorder now. Releases on January 22nd, 2027.

For international orders greater than 2 units: please email us before ordering so we can calculate shipping, thanks!

About the Author

Christopher Klingbeil is the author of the chapbook, Evaporatus. His writing has appeared in the Denver Quarterly, Painted Bride Quarterly, & Salt Hill Journal, among other publications. Through much of the 2010s, he worked as a government lumberjack across the U.S. West before arriving in northern Colorado, where he lives with his wife & children. He teaches English & creative writing at Wyoming State College. You can find him online at  www.christopherklingbeil.com

Author photo provided by Courtney Springer

Reviews

“Chris Klingbeil’s exclamatory Landscape, Dad! reads as a field guide to the phenomenology of parenting, insisting on what I believe is true: that the world demands we twin together the philosophical and the practical, the principle and the playground, if we want to help usher another life into the world. He offers the facts as only a poet in desperate love with his subject can—the beauty of the earth and our wonder at it, and then, wonder’s other side, that fear and doubt that shadow us even now. With a rueful lyric candor, we are given a parent’s guilt of his own complicity in the unthinkable complexity of the world, be it pandemic or nail in the grass that punctures the child’s heel—and through it all, an abiding sense that love alone can tend the wound it cannot wholly heal.”

—Dan Beachy-Quick, author of A Whaler's Dictionary and Mullberry