James Benger

"Waiting on Hummingbirds, the latest dual poetry joint by Jason Baldinger and James Benger, is a bold and sympathetic meditation on the wrack, rumble, and backroad precariousness found in the protoplasm of American experience. A read I heartily recommend." -John Burroughs, 2022-2023 U. S. Beat Poet Laureate"In lyric poems and ballads, Benger and Baldinger pay homage to the gritty, black and white life of stuckness that plays out in single wides, 3rd shifts and temp work. Here, the king of childhood bites off the head of a mouse. The first Halloween costume is Dad's clothes and empty gunbelt, "There, you're a cowboy," heading into a "real neighborhood" of "a city-ordained septic tank/and mailboxes." This is tender witness of lower case saturdays and the slow passing of time when finally, "we start to look like our mothers/pre-dawn, lap full of guitar/metronome clicking 'til/a freight train derails/has anyone else noticed/the drop ceiling they installed in the sky?"-Karen Schubert, "author of The Compost Reader""Imagine yourself in the backseat of a beater, a sodium-lit highway, an overnight road trip with two friends whose stories are each more fluent, more deft and tender in turn. That gets to some of what I felt while reading Waiting on Hummingbirds. These profound, observant, humane poems occasionally shook me like rumble strips, startling with a suddenness of feeling, an exclamation of surprise. At the end of my reading, I returned to the first page and began again. The landscapes and lives Baldinger and Benger move through invite revisiting, hold out to us who may, ourselves, feel like strays, "an offering / a small good thing / to bring the rain." -Jennifer Browne, American Crow

James Benger has written a bunch of stuff. Some of it has even been published in print and on the interwebs. He is the resident slacker on the Board of Directors of the Writers Place, and is the most truant member of the Riverfront Readings Committee. He is also the admin of an online poetry workshop called 365 Poems in 365 Days, which has produced four anthologies and counting. He lives and Kansas City with his wife and children. Sarah Worrel works as a paraeducator and is a mother, a video gamer, and a bookworm. She co-authored her first and second books of poetry with James Benger: Misfits in the Front Row and Ravenous and Salivating. She also writes short stories that have been published in Coal City Review, James Gunn's Ad Astra, and the anthology The New Normal. On Halloween 2023, redbat books released Lindsey Martin-Bowen's seventh poetry book, CASHING CHECKS with Jim Morrison. Her poetry collection, Where Water Meets the Rock (39 WEST PRESS 2017) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, her CROSSING KANSAS with Jim Morrison (in chapbook form) was a semi-finalist in the QuillsEdge Press 2015-2016 Chapbook Contest., and in 2017, it won the Kansas Writers Association award, "Looks Like a Million." In 2016, Writer's Digest gave her "Vegetable Linguistics" an Honorable Mention in its 85th Annual Contest. Her Inside Virgil's Garage (Chatter House Press 2013) was a runner-up in the 2015 Nelson Poetry Book Award, and a poem from it was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. McClatchy Newspapers/The Kansas City Star named her Standing on the Edge of the World (Woodley Press/Washburn University) one of the Ten Top Poetry Books of 2008. It was nominated for a Pen Award. Her poems have run in Contemporary Surrealist and Magical Realist Poetry, New Letters, I-70 Review, Thorny Locust, Tittynope Zine, Coal City Review, Amethyst Arsenic, Silver Birch Press, Flint Hills Review, Bare Root Review, The Same, Phantom Drift, Porter Gulch Review, Rockhurst Review, 21 anthologies, and other literary magazines. She taught at the University of Missouri- Kansas City 18 years, often concurrently at JCCC, MCC -Penn Valley, and MCC-Longview 25 years, and she taught writing, Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, and American Court Systems (online) for Blue Mountain College in Pendleton, Oregon (2019-2024), . She holds an MA from the University of Missouri and a Juris Doctor degree from the UMKC Law School. While teaching at UMKC and MCCU-Longview, she concurrently taught creative writing, World Literature, and other writing classes at MCCC--Penn Valley for (1993-2005) and Johnson County Community College (1988-2005.) In a previous life, she was a full-time newspaper reporter for The Louisville Times (Louisville, Colorado) and for The SUN Newspapers Johnson County, Kansas), an associate editor for Modern Jeweler Magazine and the Editor for The National Paralegal Reporter.

"The latest collaboration between Jason Baldinger and James Benger hits like perfect rock n' roll poetry dedicated to every bar regular who never thought anything of their thoughts and instead decided to light a cigarette. With images of winters too cold for human empathy and midwestern frustrations brought on because nothing wants to go right, Baldinger and Benger's latest is an excellent portrait of poetic working-class Americana. A fiery Whitman-esque yawp not meant for literary luminaries but for those who don't know how to define the fire within themselves." -Daniel W. Wright, author of Love Letters from the Underground"In This Still Life, Jason Baldinger & James Benger return for a third masterful collaboration with Baldinger sending out his calls like a lone bird in the Rust Belt, waiting for Benger's answer in the Midwest. Two unique voices studying this span where "we only live a handful of days", finding the beauty in struggle & loss through fine-tuned lenses as time & place are travelled, observed, & recorded for any who come across this collection of musings in the future. "All this is temporary", so let's make our way to the stream or ocean & enjoy this moment before we resurface." -Tim Heerdink, author of Somniloquy & Trauma in the Knottseau Well"Whether they're set in a factory, or thrift store, a woods or city sidewalk, the poems in This Still Life illustrate two simultaneous accounts of life in this USA. The poems converse and converge, often in cars or riverbanks-Benger: rivers flow in the unblemished sky/a sky that if you squint/and try real hard/will tell you/sweet air is still out there/just not here. Baldinger: I see a burial party/come to cover you in mud/while that rain brown river/never dredged safe/rages in a concrete bed. The poems here recount life's moments-ball games, nights out, car rides-as if ceremonial, the everyday made holy by virtue of attentiveness. Baldinger: this is the midwest/every road is a candlelit hex/every road is a crossroad drugstore/every road is a tattooed waitress/sleevedin an abandoned gas station. Benger: he thinks of the walnuts on grandpa's farm/how clean and pure they tasted/how precise/how delicate the procedure/of removing flesh from shell/how it never rained/or if it did/it wouldn't last." The world that Baldinger and Benger paint together is a world of reverence and nostalgia, of loyalty and reminiscence, where their eager brushstrokes of right now are forever water-colored with a mist of what once was." -Kerry Trautman, author of Artifacts and To Be Nonchalantly Alive"In This Still Life, Jason Baldinger and James Benger offer keen observations and reflections about struggle, nostalgia, and monotony as they take us through the junk pile of a collapsed world. This bold and effortless collaboration sheds a light on those picking through the pile, trying to make some sort of life from the rubble."-Cord Moreski, Author of The News Around Town, Host of The Couch Poets Collective

"I woke up at 3 and thought I'd read a few poems and ended up reading it all. It's one of the best collections I've read this year." - Jeremy Gulley, author of Inner Thoughts of a Stable Genius "Sharp and fun, this book speaks from a variety of genuine points of view about relatable school experiences. Not only is it a throwback to those days, but it also made me reconsider how I perceived, and now perceive, my former peers." - Linzi Garcia, author of Thank You "This is a collection for all the many kids who don't quite fit into school, who, in Dylan's words, are "always on the outside of whatever side there was." This book will be treasured by all the misfit kids. Wish I'd had a copy when I was in school." - Brian Daldorph, author of Kansas Poems

Against the Dark: Road PoemsBenger and Sheldon team up for this split investigating the power of life on the road, with the focus of high beams on country roads and the squealing tires of sudden veering, these poems will take you for a ride you won't want to end. Gritty, potent and earnest, these two poets work together to create a wrenching tale. bios: James Benger (Derek) is a father, husband and writer. His work has been featured in several publications. He is the author of two fiction ebooks: Flight 776 (2012) and Jack of Diamonds (2013), two chapbooks of poetry: As I Watch You Fade (EMP, 2016) and You've Heard It All Before (GigaPoem, 2017), and one split book of poetry with Jason Baldinger: Little Fires Hiding (Kung Fu Treachery Press, 2018). He is a member of the Riverfront Readings Committee in Kansas City, and is the founder of the 365 Poems In 365 Days online poetry workshop and Editor-in-Chief of the subsequent anthology series. He lives in Kansas City with his wife and son. Tyler Robert Sheldon (Rex) has four books, including the poetry collection Driving Together (Meadowlark, 2018) and the chapbook Consolation Prize (Finishing Line, 2018). He received the 2016 Charles E. Walton Essay Award and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Pleiades, Quiddity, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and other venues. Sheldon holds an MA in English from Emporia State University and is an MFA candidate at McNeese State University. He lives in Baton Rouge and is married to the artist Alex Arceneaux.

"Jason Baldinger and James Benger's Little Fires Hiding offers glances into alternate realities, into what might have been, not only for Baldinger and Benger, but the assortment of working class characters who occupy their world. To use a phrase from one of Baldinger's pieces in the collection, they are birds who've contemplated the higher branches of the tree, probably more than a few times. Like many of us, they never quite get there, but their poems do, and like the sunlight, they cast a certain amount of beauty on the respective cities that these these two gifted poets, choose, quite happily, to call home and even though they're separated by many miles, they come together seamlessly." --John Dorsey, Author of Damsels in Detroit