Redlin or Rodin

Christopher Vondracek is the author of Dancing with Welk: Music, Memory, and Prairie Troubadours and the poetry collection Rattlesnake Summer, featuring a poem for each of South Dakota's sixty-six counties. He is the Washington correspondent with the Minnesota Star Tribune and former agricultural reporter for the newspaper.

"An engaging, lyrical love letter to the Midwest. . . . Writing with an earnest, humane eye, Christopher Vondracek serves as a thoughtful docent to Midwestern art. . . . Along the way, he illuminates the lived realities of farming communities in the Great Plains and Upper Midwest; their long, slow drift toward precarity, and their persistent cultural attachment to place."--Gretchen Marquette, author of May Day: Poems "With enviable insight and humor, Redlin or Rodin brilliantly examines the forces that seek to define our own landscapes, reckoning with the effects of images and memories that comfort, deceive, and idealize us."--J. Ryan Stradal, author of Great Kitchens of the Midwest: A Novel "You don't quite read Christopher Vondracek's latest memoir--you hold on. Redlin or Rodin is a Sunday sally down a washboard road, the driver--a journalist by trade, a philosopher at heart--searching for the meaning of his denuded Midwestern roots in the most unlikely of places: the saccharine landscape paintings of Terry Redlin, 'our strip mall Seurat.' These probing, witty, and ever-companionable essays herald the arrival of one of the most exciting new voices of the plains."--Carson Vaughan, author of Zoo Nebraska: The Dismantling of an American Dream