Once upon a time, ancient glaciers oozed light through the general living room of America, scraping the terrain into the sweeping prairies of the Midwest, a superlatively grassy expanse in which American bison cavorted with dangerous electric fish-goats and no one got hurt. That was a long time ago. Then one day we woke up and it was everywhere: ULTRAMEGAPRAIRELAND.

Referentially crammed and brimming with cultural bling, the poems in ULTRAMEGAPRAIRIELAND range from forlorn to flipped out, citing and subverting far-flung sources high, holy, and WTF.

"I wrote all of the poems after moving back to the Midwest from the Middle East, " explains Workman. "They are all somehow symptomatic of my inability to adjust, not to the Midwest per se, but just in general. Surviving the Midwest is all about juxtaposition."

Elisabeth Workman is the author of several chapbooks. This is her first book-length collection. She lives in Minneapolis with designer/typographer Erik Brandt and their daughter.