46 pp.
$15.00 paper

84 pp.
$14.95 paper

BUY THIS BOOK The University of Akron Press, 2007

Poem Highlight: "The Stones at Callanish, Isle of Lewis"

Winner 2002 Akron Prize in Poetry
Judge: Charles Simic, 96 pp.
$14.95 paper

BUY THIS BOOK  The University of Akron Press, 2003

"We want a book—be it a work of fiction or poetry—to remind us how varied and complex our experience of the world can be at times. And yet when we encounter such a book, we realize how rarely we come across one that fits that description and how astonishing it is when we do. Roger Mitchell's Delicate Bait is such a book. Not many poets now writing have as wide a range as he does, both in terms of subject matter and form. His poems are rich in detail, masterly in execution, and always a good read. He is savvy about the way we Americans live and try to make sense of our lives in this moment in history."

—Charles Simic

Poem Highlight: "Delicate Bait"

The Figures, 2001, Great Barrington, MA
66 pp.
$10.00 paper

BUY THIS BOOK  Small Press Distribution

"The poems in this book are full of sharp detail, words that seem like one-celled creatures with a life of their own, keen wit, and observations on "getting the soul arranged in space" that cut to the chase. In these mostly short pieces, each tight as a fist and clear as a windowpane, Mitchell redefines love and nature, in a style that is a kind of meditative activism." 

—Terence Winch

Poem Highlight  "Things Light Finds To Be"

Table of Contents

Reviews

top

The Figures, 1997, Great Barrington, MA
59 pp.
$10.00 paper

BUY THIS BOOK Small Press Distribution 

              but most particularly situations, human 
                  for the most part, 
              recognizable, sliced off the quivering, thick ham 
                  of immediate being-in-the-world.

Braid is the sort of poem that when you get to the end you begin again." 

—William Corbett

Poem Highlight  "Braid" (excerpt)

Table of Contents

Reviews

top

BkMk Press, 1996, Kansas City, MO
54 pp.
$10.95 paper

BUY THIS BOOK   BkMk Press

"Half dream, half wry, hard bitten quite ordinary fact, Roger Mitchell's poems are meditations in the freshest, most unextravagant sense. A remembered trip by train through Europe, or a glance out the car window while cutting through Indiana's endless fields—all things are suddenly ancient and made to matter though the scale is human, eye-level. It's this unsentimental goodness in the work that most moves me. And how each poem turns and turns again, making its way by slow surprise. This is a book to treasure." 

—Marianne Boruch

Table of Contents

Reviews

top

 
Winner of the 1990 John Ben Snow Award  
230 pp. 
$29.95 cloth

BUY THIS BOOK Syracuse University Press, 1991

"This is the story of poet Roger Mitchell's unique and intriguing search through more than a century of historical threads, looking for "a simple, singular man." The ostensible subject of his inquiry, one Israel Johnson, was a nineteenth-century pioneer settler who lived deep in the Adirondack wilderness. Despite having developed patents for a type of sawmill that remained in use well into the twentieth century, which could have made him rich, Johnson was "no one in particular," an everyman who died penniless, very nearly lost in the mists of time." 

—From the jacket copy

Reviews

top

BkMk Press, Kansas City, MO,1988; reissued in paper, 2003. 
61 pp. 
$12.95 paper

BUY THIS BOOK  BkMk Press 

"This book has a great page of epigraphs which help define the genre—a rendering into poetry of the primary sources about an era/area. E.g.: "He will tell you history and no lies," says Homer. "We have failed to live up to our geography," says Theodore Roethke. Mitchell gives us a history of the Adirondacks, with the Indian languages, travelers' accounts, song and dances, diaries, museum artifacts, and the poet's own deeply-rooted personal experience. It is a book that scholars will respect, poets will admire, and general readers who care about our wild history will cherish." 

—Marion K. Stocking, Beloit Poetry Journal     

Poem Highlight  "1898"

Table of Contents

Reviews

Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1986
80 pp. 
$6.00 paper

BUY THIS BOOK Cleveland State University Poetry Center

"Roger Mitchell, like all good writers is not one thing but is many: he is wise, affectionate, rueful, judicious, eccentric. But above all he is funny and he is tender, qualities that make his poetry concentrically pleasurable. Whether he writes about Walt Whitman, bus stations, Howard Johnson restaurants, or the little ecstasies of family life, Roger Mitchell proves himself to be a remarkable poet. That has never been so true as it is in A Clear Space on a Cold Day." 

—Dave Smith

Poem Highlight  "The Life I Am Living"

Table of Contents

Reviews

top

New Rivers Press, 1976, New York 
95 pp.
$5.00 paper

BUY THIS BOOK: "Moving" can be obtained from the author at P.O. Box 457, Jay, NY 12941.  

"This is a well-written book of poetry by a poet of great skill and taste in language, who is clearly in control of what he is doing. Two stanzas from 'Edges': 

There are many passages and poems in this book that exhibit this kind of clarity and this strong and authentic sense of the whole of things." 

—John M. Bennett, Small Press Review

Table of Contents

Reviews

top

Winner 1972 Midland Poetry Award
New Rivers Press, New York, 1971; reprinted 1974 
79 pp. 
$5.00 paper.

BUY THIS BOOK: This book can be obtained from the author at P.O. Box 457, Jay, NY 12941.  

—Milwaukee Journal

Poem Highlight  "Walking in Cracow"

Table of Contents

Reviews

top