Dust Storms May Exist

Description

Dust Storms May Exist

poems by Ben Groner III

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Dust Storms May Exist follows the trajectory of a 10,000-mile road trip, exploring the geography, music, and history of America while mapping its astonishments and disillusionments. Ben Groner III searches for a dead father, wrestles with belief and doubt, yearns for sensuality, and recalls the freedom and loneliness of traveling in South America. Bluegrass and cowboy songs seep across the pages as he moves through canyons, bayous, cornfields, museums, gas stations, dance halls, and memory’s refracting landscapes. These poems are a reckoning with what his country is and could be, a meditation on the palpability of absence, a discovery of the searing border between friendship and love, a realization that longing revolves at the core of all experience.

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 This is a stunner of a book, one that created the quietest of spaces where I could immerse myself in Ben Groner’s many sojourns across exquisite terrains made even more so by his unwavering curiosity, his keen ear, and his reverent wonder. I’m grateful for poems and poets like this. I’m grateful for the reminder to slow down, to take notice, and as the final words of the book suggest, to step into my own life.

—Destiny O. Birdsong, author of Negotiations and Nobody’s Magic

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Dust Storms May Exist is a powerful book of odes and elegies, reflections on a father gone too soon and a country seemingly unraveling, like the “Untied States” on a sign remembered from a road trip. These are poems of travel and exploration, weathering storms of many kinds along the journey, always delivering a sense of rich and meaningful arrival.

—Jesse Graves, author of Merciful Days and Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine

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Dust Storms May Exist is a stunning collection “drenched in gladness” and gorgeous imagery, striking that delicate balance between beauty and ache at the seam of each poem. Ben Groner III is a poet who pierces each moment with reverence and brilliant examinations of the human spirit.… This book continually held my attention and my heart.

—Tiana Clark, author of I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood

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Vastness in all its forms—sky, land, time, ache, faith, even language itself—is at the heart of Ben Groner’s first collection, Dust Storms May Exist. From Bolivia to Chile, from Cana to Capernaum—and with so much “shimmering and shifting / around us”—Groner asks, “Where can one ground oneself?” Maybe there’s no comforting, enveloping answer but, instead, only this radiant life where strangers—all sons and daughters—sometimes find themselves in shared spaces, marveling, attuned to the same mysteries.

—Jeff Hardin, author of A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being

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Reviews

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Dust Storms May Exist, Reviewed by Cristina Rascón for Fireflies’ Light, October 2025.

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Ben Groner III is the author of the poetry collectionDust Storms May Exist, winner of the 2024 American Fiction Award for Religious Poetry and the 2025 Storytrade Book Award for Poetry. It was also named the Best Poetry Collection of 2024 by The Nashville Scene. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Orison Anthology, and been published in Peatsmoke Journal, GASHER, South Carolina Review, Rust & Moth, andelsewhere. He was also formerly a bookseller at Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tennessee.