Offer the Cup to a Friend is Ford Swetnam’s last book, published by Limberlost Press in Boise. Rick Ardinger, publisher, describes the book as a very warm collection about the author’s love for the Arco Desert and about his life at the last stages of prostate cancer. 

The harsh sagebrush and lava rock terrain of the Arco desert become complex and beautiful in this collection of poems.  Ford is honest with observation and reflection.  Hidden in this landscape is nuclear waste.  Imagery of the poem “Lost River Lascaux,” is haunting: 

 In “Where Will the Plutonium Go?”  we are taken camping in the desert and asked “have you heard the silence just before moonrise, when coyotes might pray?”  Other pieces explore socio-political mazes of life.  The reader navigates the streams and bureaucracy of Seattle with the author guiding us over “dam after dam after dam” in “Want to Feel like a Salmon.” 

River imagery flows into the next poem, and the reader is swept into the world of disease: 

This collection of poems is a symbolic journey to desert, to our humanness. It explores each issue without sentimentality, but with clarity and truth.  Ford’s voice lives in this body of poetry collected in Offer the Cup to a Friend.  He weaves relationships, disease and reality into meaningful, sometimes disturbing narrative.  The reader travels the terrible, the beautiful terrain of the Arco desert and arrives to discover a natural world as complex and fragile as the human condition.  This work is his gift to us.  It is “the cup offered first to a friend.” 

Libraries collecting the work of Idaho writers should have a copy of this in their collections. 

Books by Swetnam include:  Another Tough Hop, Walrus & Carpenter Books (Pocatello); 301, The Redneck Press (Pocatello); Ghostholders Know, Blue Scarab Press (Pocatello.)