The Rural Lives of Nice Girls: Poems New and Selected

Gailmarie Pahmeier's The Rural Lives of Nice Girls creates a world of longing and loss across the barrooms and front porches of Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Nevada, revealing a geography of magic and shame, where the narrator unapologetically delivers something/ real good and real strong. --Suzanne Roberts, Author of Plotting Temporality
Gailmarie Pahmeier's poems are lush, cinematic narratives from a singular American female voice -- mesmerizing in their grace, masterful in their craft. As much as these poems are pure heart and soul, they are gems: pieces of art by a gorgeous spirit and a talent any poet should envy. These are the poems I wish I could write---fortunately I get to read them, again and again, a pure joy every time. --Lee Herrick, Author of Gardening Secrets of the Dead
Gailmarie s supple poems are tales of family and home finding it, making it, cooking it, calling it, leaving it. They open the door, invite you in to sit a spell, maybe have a drink, listen to lyric stories of small town lives off the side of the highway, to hear about the taste of dreams, the importance of makeup and a mother's rhinestone pumps. Listen she says, it s important for these folks, as well as the rest of us, to tell the stories that need to be told, to witness and testify whilst we can. --Kirk Robertson, Poet, essayist, publisher, editor, and artist

Gailmarie Pahmeier teaches creative writing at the University of Nevada and in the MFA Program at Sierra Nevada University. Widely published, she’s the author of three chapbooks and two full-length collections of poetry, including The Rural Lives of Nice Girls. In 2015, she was appointed Reno’s first Poet Laureate, in 2016 she was inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame, and in 2017, she was selected as Nevada’s Outstanding Teacher in the Humanities.