---

Available at fine bookstores everywhere.

Photos in Niagara Digressions - click on the cup.

A seasoned storyteller’s work via cut-up method, combining history and naturalist memoir, Niagara Digressions presents land as historical palimpsest, from ancient cave paintings to 1960s mimeographed poetry, the massacre of the buffalo to the manufacture of shredded wheat cereal, and all points in-between. Everybody thinks they know Niagara, but not this Niagara. E.R. Baxter III is a tour guide who knows the indirect path offers the best views.

If readers can be sensitive enough to absorb its complexities, they can also absorb its riches, and discover, as this book suggests, that they “can spreadeagle themselves on the ground and feel the earth’s slow revolving and, simultaneously, here in Western New York, its rebounding, too, from its compression of thousands of years under ice.” – Eric Gansworth, author of Extra Indians, from the Introduction

Bob Baxter is a Niagara treasure. In telling his own story, he tells the story of place that, like him, can be amusing, lyrical, dark and deeply profound. Niagara Digressions is filled with his dry wit, but is also suffused with real love for his lifelong home. – Ginger Strand, author of Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power & Lies

E.R. Baxter III, Niagara County Community College Professor Emeritus of English, has been a fellow of a New York State Creative Service Award for fiction and a recipient of a Just Buffalo Award for Fiction. Other publications include Niagara Lost and Found: New and Selected Poems; Looking for Niagara (Poetry);  and the chapbooks And Other Poems; A Good War; Hunger; and What I Want.

Reading an associative passage written on the way to Niagara Digressions.
In the Book Corner loft, Niagara Falls, New York, 2009.

---