This volume, the first to span the forty-year career of Nebraska state poet William Kloefkorn, brings together the best-known and most beloved poems by one of the most important Midwestern poets of the last half century. Collecting work from limited editions and hard-to-find books, along with Kloefkorn's most anthologized poems, Swallowing the Soap is an indispensable one-volume compendium of the work of a major American poet. "These poems aim for nothing less than the impossible: to understand what it means to be alive and human on this moveable earth," writes the editor, Ted Genoways. Swallowing the Soap is filled with the panoramic landscapes of Kansas and Nebraska, the stories of the rough and tender people who live there, and the moments of heartache, brutality, loss, and redeeming joy that shape their lives. It offers a vision, at once intimate and expansive, of the world of the Great Plains as seen by one of its most eloquent poets. William Kloefkorn is Nebraska's state poet and emeritus professor of English at Nebraska Wesleyan University. He is the author of many volumes of poetry and several memoirs: This Death by Drowning (1997), Restoring the Burnt Child (2003), At Home on this Moveable Earth (2006), and most recently, Breathing in the Fullness of Time (2009), all published by the University of Nebraska Press. Ted Genoways is the editor of Virginia Quarterly Review and the author of Bullroarer (Northeastern, 2001) which won the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize, the Natalie Ornish Poetry Award, and the Nebraska Book Award. He has edited numerous books including The Selected Poems of Miguel Hernández (Chicago, 2001) and The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman: The Correspondence, Volume VII (Iowa, 2004).