My New Poetry Collection: Riceland

My fourth poetry collection, Riceland, is now available from Unbound Content. These poems deal with my childhood on a rice farm in eastern Arkansas, with my mother's illness and death, and with the ramifications of these events for my family. This is the collection I've been working on for the last ten years, so I think it's safe to say it's my best to date. Here's what a few other people have said:

In Riceland, Bledsoe is unswerving in his depiction of the beauty, despair, and bludgeoning cruelty of life on an Arkansas farm. Be prepared—stark and startlingly revealing, these poems will sear your soul.

--Jo McDougall, author of Dirt, Satisfied With Havoc, and Daddy’s Money

C. L Bledsoe’s Riceland is full of natural wonder. Bledsoe pays attention and documents daily life with skill and cunning and we are lucky to have such a poet in our midst. At times he reminds me of Jim Harrison, in his ruthless eye for man’s connection to nature and his search for balance, in an increasingly severe world. Bledsoe writes equally well about farming, about the physical world, about place, and about family. Riceland is a book to contemplate, to help see through a true poet’s eyes and to read again for its hard-won grace and gentle wisdom.

--Corey Mesler, author of Some Identity Problems and The Ballad of the Two Tom Mores



“I know how to grow things, and I know how to kill them," writes C. L. Bledsoe in Riceland, a book set in the rice fields and dirt roads of rural Arkansas at the end of the twentieth century. Bledsoe captures the darkness, violence, and longing of a young man growing up at a time, when so many family farms, like his father's, are going under. The death of the family farm is the larger theme, but the poems about his mother--and his inability, as a child, to understand the Huntington's disease that cripples and eventually destroys her--are the heartbreaking heart of the book. In a world that makes no sense, he approaches adulthood "wishing time would stop, speed up, something." Although he tells us, after a dream of rabbit hunting on the lost farm, that "nothing could console me," there is a consolation in the dark beauty of these poems.
--Ed Madden, author of Signals and Prodigal Variations

Here's a link to the sale page:
https://www.createspace.com/4366870