Driving the Tender Desert Home (2014) by Shaun T. Griffin

"The world conjured by Driving the Tender Desert Home begins with the cover image, an impression of mountains, sky, and wild horses. This is a beautiful chapbook, lovingly assembled on high quality paper that is a pleasure to touch and hold. Within its pages, we read poems that captivate and resonate, journeying from the beaches to Latin America to the snowfields of the arctic to the weightless realm of outer space. At the same time, Griffin plumbs the depth of inner experience. His ability to give words to the feelings we didn't know we had is a rare and precious gift.” — Krista Lukas

Driving the Tender Desert Home takes us on a journey through a high and dry and beautiful landscape of the heart, last poems to a father, a remembrance of the poet Hayden Carruth, sage and antelope and high towering cumulus clouds above two-lane blacktop stretched across a vast and windblown expanse of the American West. Shaun Griffin is the true poet laureate of Nevada, a desert troubadour, whose poems drive home with a cadence we remember long after our journey.

Griffin is the co-founder and director of Community Chest, a rural social justice agency serving northwestern Nevada since 1991. This Is What the Desert Surrenders, New and Selected Poems, came out from Black Rock Press in 2012. He’s also the editor of a collection of essays on the poet Hayden Carruth, entitled From Sorrow’s Well. He’s a recipient of the 1995 Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. For over 20 years he has taught a poetry workshop at Northern Nevada Correctional Center.