A scholar, memoirist, and biographer, Alan Weltzien, as On the Beach amply demonstrates, is also a major Montana poet. Just as Norman Maclean knew rivers and family, Weltzien knows mountains and shorelines (and rivers, too), knows steep pitches and snow, knows what it means to grow up and grow older, what it means to be a son, a husband, and a father; these are poems of work and books, history, friendship, and returning home. Deeply moving, and deeply felt, On the Beach stands with the finest poetry and nature writing ever produced in the Treasure State.

—Brady Harrison, author of The Term Between: Stories

I wish this poet was sitting at my kitchen table, wise-cracking and spinning tales. His eyes and his heart are wide open. His intellect, both electric and electrifying, strikes lightning poem by poem. He's humorous, humble, humane. Alan Weltzien's On the Beach, threads "decades of geographies" into a heartfelt collection of memories and conjectures, all offered to us by the generous professor who laughs at himself when "shat" upon mid-lecture by a bird in an outdoor classroom. At the height of his artistry, this poet winks and claims he's "ever more certain of what I don't know."

—Lowell Jaeger, Montana Poet Laureate 2017-2019

About Cirque Press

Cirque Press was established in 2017, to publish the work of writers from Alaska and the Northwest.

It developed quite naturally from Cirque Journal, established in 2008.

Sandra Kleven and Michael Burwell are founders, editors and publishers.