Benjamin Myers won the Oklahoma Book Award for Poetry for his first book, Elegy for Trains. His poems may be read in numerous literary journals, including The New York Quarterly, Nimrod, Tar River Poetry, Borderlands, Salamander, and the Chiron Review, as well as online in Devil’s Lake, DMQ Review, The Pedestal Magazine, Elimae, Poetrybay, and elsewhere. He lives in Chandler, Oklahoma.

Books by Benjamin Myers:

Other poems on the web by Benjamin Myers:
"Talking to my Racist Friend"
"On Taking Communion with My Students"
Three poems

About Lapse Americana:

"Memory is the axis these splendidly evocative poems revolve around, poems infused with a hard-won wisdom, melancholy and affection for the poet's childhood and young manhood in a prairie setting. Benjamin Myers delights and surprises us by his startling imagery and technical skill, but even more by a rueful awareness of the swiftness of time, and the wonder of the ordinary events that fill it."
—Lynne Sharon Schwartz

"Benjamin Myers' work is bedrock American with county fair Ferris wheels and the drought cracked earth of Oklahoma always in the foreground; no glamor sugar coats the boredom of small town teenagers. His honesty scorches in his war poems, in his compassion for the woman left behind by a husband starting a second family, and in his own safe bookish life. We are all complicit in the life portrayed by this poetry, although few of us have the daring of his directness."
—Karen Swenson

"In Lapse Americana, Benjamin Myers proves the poem is ready to take on anything and everything, whether it's Dante, Oklahoma, the city dump, Virgil, the circus, the analog world, Anchises, divorce, the Alamo, racist friends, Paul Klee, Hamlet, harvest, and yes, even mannequins, knock-knock jokes, Odin, and head lice. Like Walt Whitman, Myers sees poetry as a democratic project, a celebratory endeavor that creates inclusion rather than exclusion. Myers' uncanny ability to merge accessibility with invention reminds me of fellow Oklahoman Woody Guthrie. Both Guthrie and Whitman would admire Lapse Americana's masterful mash up of aesthetics and ethics. Of one thing I'm certain—this poetic land was made for you and me."
—Dean Rader