HEAVY LEAD BIRDSONG
Write Bloody Publishing | 2008 | New Edition 2026
Poems featured in Only Poems and the Individual World Poetry Slam
This expanded edition features new poems and author notes
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“Ryler Dustin’s Heavy Lead Birdsong is an unflinchingly honest book that looks into the beautifully flawed heart of humanity and refuses to turn away.”
—James Crews, author of How to Love the World and The Sacred Everyday
“Ryler Dustin is hands down the most exciting young poet I have encountered in ten years of coast-to-coast travels through the poetry underground. Read this book; you’ll find him telling you truths—like all great poets—that he has no right to know.”
—Jack McCarthy, author of Drunks and Other Poems of Recovery
Featuring poems that propelled Ryler Dustin to the final stage of the Individual World Poetry Slam, Heavy Lead Birdsong is a collection of love poems to humanity: our awkwardness and resilience, our fragility and moments of courage. In these pages, an old man plants orchards in his own chest, angels write messages encoded in boxcar graffiti, and a dangerous car ride through the dead of winter takes us to the Ice Age, when we might have been snuffed out forever. This second edition includes new work and extensive author notes. Inspired by science and religion, grounded in subtle humor, these poems reach off the page to meet
the softest part of you, right here, in the sweet bruise
of your breath, this unfolding
where you live between yourself
and the world and speaking it.
TRAILER PARK PSALMS
University of Pittsburgh | 2023
Winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, selected by Jeffrey McDaniel
Longlist finalist for the Julie Suk Award
“Ryler Dustin’s poems achieve a clear and accessible quality, not through the simplicity of idea or emotion (for his poems are rich with surprising language and complex sentiment) but through his remarkable facility with syntax. Indeed, his elegant sentences convey feeling with vulnerability and sensitivity, while achieving what can only be called pure music.”
— Kwame Dawes, author of Nebraska
“These are poems of love and ferocious need, and what is loved is all-encompassing, from a stolen cigarette to a wayward star. This is a voice from an American wilderness, one that has echoes of Whitman, in its largeness and its heart.”
— Nick Flynn, author of Low
“The poems in Ryler Dustin’s Trailer Park Psalms radiate with ache, pull us toward the awe of memory and love and the holy ringing only a body can make.“
— Stacey Waite, author of Butch Geography
Trailer Park Psalms traces the speaker’s journey beyond his boyhood trailer park, through an American landscape marked by violence—from a gas line explosion in his hometown to his father’s war memories to the scars of colonialism inscribed in place, language, and ecology. Along the way, he searches for sources of awe that might inspire us, even in a compromised world: the everyday miracle of eyesight, the courage of the Voyager spacecrafts, and the “clumsy kindness” of family members trying to mend the damages of the past. In the end, what he finds is the hope that “if there’s a heaven, we will bend / to examine our old selves / and wonder how something so delicate / was ever allowed.”
SOMETHING BRIGHT
Green Linden Press (Chapbook) | 2022
Finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award in Independent Publishing
“With real clarity, these poems meditate on the persistence of memory, the difficulties of love, and the curiosities of ecology, always offering us voyages toward knowledge, awe, and an invigorated sense of self.”
— Kevin Prufer, author of The Fears
“What I have loved about Ryler Dustin’s poems since I first heard him read them in Bellingham, Washington, back in 2007 is the way they are offered with a gentle quiet that gives way to the quiet in me. Something Bright is no different, how his reflections on memory and place within the Pacific Northwest call to how the we fit in the worlds that surround us, similar to how a walk in the forest allows us to join the conversation of silence that passes between the trees.”
— Anis Mojgani, Poet Laureate of Oregon
Featuring cover art by Washington artist Nikki McClure, this 41-page, perfect-bound chapbook explores boyhood wonder, far-ranging travels, and the beauty and ruin of the Pacific Northwest.
RYLER DUSTIN 