John Engler

JOHN ENGLER {[email protected]} is a principal lecturer of English at Utah State University where he has taught more than two hundred courses in creative writing, composition, and literature. He is the author of a variety of essays, articles, and book reviews; has done editorial work with a number of journals; and consults with university faculty members and high school teachers on innovative teaching pedagogy.

Whispers from the Poker Table | John Bennion, The Dead Fathers: Grief and Poker in the West Desert

Articles/Essays – Volume 59, No. 3

The triumph of The Dead Fathers is an ending that I don’t dare spoil; it lands as an epic culmination of a subtly expanding panorama I hadn’t seen coming. John Bennion spends nearly five hundred pages in Utah’s West Desert—spare, wind-scoured, abandoned and rediscovered—and then, in the final movements, he opens the aperture until a hermit’s private grief feels communal, even cosmic. If that sounds grand, it is. Bennion delivers the unexpected.

In Search of . . . Nah, Just Make It Yourself | Michael Hicks, Wineskin: Freakin’ Jesusin the 60s and 70s, A Memoir

Articles/Essays – Volume 57, No. 2

From the minute I saw the title, I wanted to like this book. And when I got the book in my hands and saw the cover art, my 1960s nostalgia and Spidey-senses kicked into high…