Learning How to Drown

Learning How to Drown charts a vivid coming-of-age across the rural Midwest. The poems, rich in narrative texture and lyrical introspection, move through grain silos and third-shift factories, train trestles and back-porch folklore. Here, ordinary days tilt toward the mythic. Kerschbaum's speaker navigates small towns and night shifts, witnessing boys daring themselves into adulthood, families weathering hardship, and the stubborn ghosts of what refuses to burn. With tough tenderness and clear-eyed music, these poems turn detasseling cuts, Walmart parking lot midnights, and machine rooms into moments of reckoning. They examine how to love a place you also need to leave. Memory keeps scratching at the door. The poems ask how to swim past fear when the shore disappears. The result is a striking portrait of endurance and the luminous, fragile lives that refuse to be forgotten.