{"product_id":"three-years-on-the-nowhere-road-the-awakening-of-a-poetic-sensibility","title":"Three Years on the Nowhere Road: The Awakening of a Poetic Sensibility","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn his memoir, Three Years on the Nowhere Road, BJ Omanson\u003cbr\u003e\nrecounts the strange and haphazard road that led him to a life of\u003cbr\u003e\npoetry-- a life of inadequate means, manual labor, wilderness\u003cbr\u003e\nsolitude and-- as he was a high-school dropout-- nothing whatever\u003cbr\u003e\nto do with writing programs or academia.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn November of 1972, married scarcely a year and having lost his\u003cbr\u003e\njob as a tree trimmer with the Rockford Park District in Illinois\u003cbr\u003e\ndue to being on the losing side of a labor strike, with winter\u003cbr\u003e\ncoming on and no prospect of comparable work before spring,\u003cbr\u003e\nOmanson made a drastic decision. He packed his uncle's WWII\u003cbr\u003e\nseabag with a change of clothes, a blanket and some books,\u003cbr\u003e\ntook five dollars from the household nest egg and announced his\u003cbr\u003e\nintention to hitchhike out to the coast of Washington State,\u003cbr\u003e\nwhere there was said to be a logging boom in progress and work\u003cbr\u003e\nto be had by anyone who could handle a chainsaw.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eHe would spend the winter camping in a primitive shelter in\u003cbr\u003e\nan alder glade above the Calawah river, working in a shake\u003cbr\u003e\nmill until his wife divorced him, after which he quit his job\u003cbr\u003e\nand spent the rest of the winter reading history, literature\u003cbr\u003e\nand ethnology, hiking for miles along rivers and the coastline\u003cbr\u003e\nwith a companionable cat, and writing poetry after the manner\u003cbr\u003e\nof Hanshan, a half-mad 8th-century Chinese hermit living in a\u003cbr\u003e\ncave above the Yellow River.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"BJ Omanson","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":44228752834721,"sku":"9781111132249","price":28.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0462\/1120\/3233\/files\/gzewky-front-shortedge-384.jpg?v=1748418636","url":"https:\/\/bookswholesale.myshopify.com\/products\/three-years-on-the-nowhere-road-the-awakening-of-a-poetic-sensibility","provider":"BooksWholesale","version":"1.0","type":"link"}