Poet & Essayist
👋🏻 Howdy. My name is Cameron. I'm a writer with roots in South Dakota. I enjoy a good espresso, Blackwing pencils, and hard bop jazz. Here’s the full bio:
Cameron Brooks is the author of Forbearance (Cascade Books, 2025). A poet and essayist from South Dakota, he holds degrees from the University of Sioux Falls (B.A.), Princeton Theological Seminary (M.A.) and Seattle Pacific University (M.F.A.). Cameron's work is found in numerous journals and anthologies, including Poetry East, Cumberland River Review, Third Wednesday, North Dakota Quarterly, Ad Fontes, New Verse Review, and elsewhere. His poem "White Space" won the South Dakota State Poetry Society annual contest.
Cameron lives in Sioux Falls with his wife and son.
Now available from Cascade Books, Forbearance features 60 poems of mirth and dearth on the vast Dakota plains and beyond.
"In lines taut as a drum or the stakes of a tent of meeting, we meet in Brooks’ Forbearance a restraint that belies an urgent strength, poems training us for some contest or some kingdom here and sure to come—as sinewy and hale a debut as I’ve seen."
— Mischa Willett, author of The Elegy Beta and Phases
Cameron Brooks's debut book is about forbearance, but capably avoids falling into sepia-toned stoicism. Instead, Brooks's collection offers a delicate, keening sense of all that is beautiful, fleeting, as well as what endures without ever becoming maudlin. The sense that time is moving as swiftly as wind through tall grass imbues these poems as in "McKennan's Golden Hour" when the narrator recounts, "Fretting about the coming weeks/ which are by now many weeks gone by..." Brooks is also a musician, and it shows. Even the titles of the poems sound like lyrics to a song, such as "The Cottonwoods Were Sowing Starry Seeds," and they are just as pleasurable to read.
— Eliza Blue, folk singer and author of Little Pasture on the Prairie
"'To savor the contingency of being' could be the mission statement of Cameron Brooks’s Forbearance, a gorgeously written evocation and meditation on life lived among the prairies, orchards, flooded farms, 'gaunt silo[s]' of South Dakota's High Plains. Brooks loves words and their glorious mouthfeels as much as he loves the world itself: 'the ooze of too-ripe apples/beneath boots,' 'the cicada’s tymbal cry.' In what he calls, with Stevensian grandeur, 'the verve/of fathomless particularities,/ becoming what they only could become,' Brooks savors, with bemused forbearance and stunned adoration, all the contingent and fleeing moments of 'the runaway chore of your life.'"
— Bruce Beasley, author of Prayershreds
"When reading Cameron Brooks’ Forbearance, the heart of his work spoke to me from lines describing our relationship with life, with the changing seasons, with ourselves, as 'longing after longing and longing again;' 'another day comes down to this: my sense that silence never proves an emptiness;' and 'not possible only, but probable that today’s most needful determination lies dormant among the caches of the past.' He is acutely aware of nature and how we occasionally cohabitate with it, but never rule it. We must make peace with these realities. I enjoyed the time spent with this book.
— Bruce Roseland, Poet Laureate of South Dakota
Where you can find my words
New Verse Review: "Pickup Smells"
Cumberland River Review: "Nocturne"
Solum Press: "A Seagull Scans a Fallow Field"
Third Wednesday: "Welcome to the World"
Ekstasis Magazine: "Dill Soup without the Dill"
Pasque Petals: "Blessed Zephyr"
North Dakota Magazine: "Red Light"
Ad Fontes: "Early Morning Embers"
Ecstatic: Wild, Wild Words: On Cormac McCarthy’s Legendary Prose Style
Vanora: Why We All Need Poetry Now
Conversant: The Land of Infinite Variety
Public Reading, Full Circle Book Co-op, Sioux Falls, SD, May 16, 2024
Open Mic, Full Circle Book Co-op, Sioux Falls, SD, November 26, 2022
Public Reading, Seattle Pacific University, August 9, 2022
Creative Writing Class, Lecture & Reading, University of Sioux Falls, November 15, 2021.
English Class, Talk & Reading, St. John Middle School, Seward, NE, Fall 2021.
John R. Milton Writer’s Conference, University of South Dakota, September 16-18, 2021.
Join me on Substack
brkscmrn.substack.com
— Ted Kooser (Former U.S. Poet Laureate)
Driving at Night
Out here, the horizon has sunk
to the humble reaches of headlights,
which bore through boundless darkness
the way a fish darts through its lake
(straight on, heedless of all other lakes)
or the way a spaceship slips through
time, so quiet. Out here, the sky
has swallowed the prairie entire,
the lamps of distant barns like stars
from forgotten constellations, guiding us
home and so far from home. How strange
it feels to travel at the speed of light.
Listen to songs I've recorded on Spotify.
Send me your inquiries, comments, brilliant ideas. I’d be happy to hear from you. Hit the button to start an email.