Way West: Stories, Essays and Verse Accounts: 1963-1993

Booklist said it well: "Dorn is probably the late twentieth century's finest chronicler of what he calls 'contemporary horse culture.' His subject is always the real West: not the West Coast, not Seattle, San Francisco, and L.A., but 'real towns' such as Scottsbluff, Nebraska, Laramie, Wyoming, and Ryegate, Montana. ('Real towns,' Dorn says, 'don't have parking meters.') We're talking the Big Open. The Big Empty."

This hefty book a collection of thirty years' worth of occasional poems and prose features a generous selection from Dorn's hard-to-find short fiction, stories populated with the working poor and the dispossessed drifters, searchers, fugitives, Native Americans, and itinerant trailer-park families. It also includes the book-length poem "Recollections of Gran Apacher??a" (1974), a sad, polemical, spiritual meditation on Geronimo, the Apaches, and their annihilation at the hands of European descendants. A third of the book consists of inflammatory essays, Gonzo travelogues, and idiosyncratic cultural analyses, and these, especially, find Dorn in fine form: witty, perverse, cantankerous, shocking, always writing well, and absolutely unable to tolerate any degree of cant.