riverSongs - New and Selected Poetry

Covington's real achievement here is geography made into a nervous system. The collection is anchored by rivers — the Rio Grande, the Mississippi, the Cannonball — but it refuses to stay put, sprawling from a Yoakum laundromat to Mogadishu to the Standing Rock encampment in "Shores of the Cannon Ball," and the included Gazetteer at the back (a genuinely clever formal choice) confirms that place isn't backdrop here, it's structure. "Ghost Trees" turns a dried Rio Grande into a haunting — "A river killed / By Trinity, perhaps / Downwind / Downrange" — and lands the historical weight of the bomb without spelling it out. "Sandhills" moves flood, cranes, and radio static into a single unbroken sensory current: "Racing radial tires spin like mad mandalas / Like mysteries dissolved by FM radio."

The book knows exactly who it's for: readers of Beat-adjacent, road-worn, confessional poetry who want the Southwest and the Gulf rendered with grit rather than postcard gloss. "Quiet is a Color" is the collection's wildest ride — a fever-dream itinerary from Boerne to Roswell that name-checks Neal Cassady, Townes Van Zandt, and Pet Shop Boys in the same breath, and it works because the voice never blinks. "Mni Wiconi" and "Concessions" widen the lens to Indigenous water rights and land history without losing the personal register.

This is a poet who has clearly logged real miles — swimming pools, submarine dreams, hospital night shifts in Minot — and the collection's strength is trusting the reader to follow the river wherever it actually goes.