“Dale Cottingham’s Midwest Hymns are indeed true songs of praise…his poems embody the spirit of the landscape and the people of the Midwest. The subtext is yearning—for home, connection, forgiveness, a sense of peace. The language of Cottingham’s poems is deceptively straightforward, quiet and unassuming, but the images he creates are poignant, cinematographic, and haunting.”

–Lana Hechtman Ayers, author of When All Else Fails

Home is more than where you don your most familiar clothes. Home is place, with all its particulars: the soil, the sky. Home is family, it is the passage of time. Home, for Dale Cottingham, is the southern plains, and the poems that he writes are his hymns to time, age, love and loss, laughter and contentment. MidWest Hymns is a meditation on what it is to live in a very particular place, to see its granularity, to be forged in that place by time. It's a meditation on how to come to terms with being alone and how to share that equanimity with the world. How else can we become one with ourselves and with the universe without becoming one with the soil beneath our feet. From the earth, we grow, and to the earth we all return. Is there a better place for this cycle than the plains?