“Etter’s details and rhythms of speech are like the inventory of curiosity or antique shops. They accumulate into poems which have the authenticity of black and white documentary films, or photos in Wright Morris’s The Home Place, and convince us with their precision. You see the same kind of beard shadows as in a Nixon interview. You smell the mixture of cigar smoke and sweat. There’s a sense of what’s gone, vanished, among the lines, but it isn’t a hand-wringing, nostalgic kind of loss. Instead, you can hear how humans sound in a place called the Middle West. This sound is always a cause for celebration, ‘always someone with a Texas-sized mouth / and some refried beans for brains.’”