Ryan J. Eilbeck’s “Nebraska” begins not with a landscape but with a weight: “the whole state sleeping hip-side on my sternum.” The image is impossible and physically exact, locating Nebraska not as scenery but as a burden carried in the chest. From that first line, geography becomes an internal condition. The speaker rises “in line / with the straight standing ghosts” of harvested corn, and the landscape turns into a mirror of depletion: split ends of dirt, empty of duty and purpose. The poem’s central idea is not simply that the Midwest is lonely; it is that emptiness itself can become an active, oppressive presence—something with weight, tension, and almost a voice.
The poem is built in free verse with line breaks that repeatedly isolate key words and make the reader feel the distances. The phrase “So, nothing” ends one stanza and “But somehow that nothing...” begins the next, letting the blank space after “nothing” perform the emptiness being described. Elsewhere enjambment slows the line: “I drive Nebraska on the double yellow line / till it disappears, like birthday candles blown out.” The disappearing line is both a road marking and a wish extinguished, and the simile turns driving into a ritual of disappointment. There is no regular rhyme, but repeated sounds and syntactic patterns hold the poem together: “flood of corn,” “straight standing ghosts,” “dry family,” “split ends of the dirt.” The language stays plain while accumulating a low, grief-like music.
Imagery of health and illness quietly sharpens the mood. The speaker’s body is pressed under the state; later the car’s fuel gauge becomes “the needle resting on the orange,” and the prescriptions in a cabinet are mentioned with the same flat tone as a co-pay. These details place the journey inside a world of managed, ongoing depression or chronic need. The gas station appears “hopeful” from a distance, yet its pumps are off and not a soul is in sight. The roadside sign’s glow is “a fading / gold like a quitting moon.” Hope is repeatedly set up and then hollowed out, but never melodramatically. It simply stops, like the pumps.
The poem’s most striking transformation comes with the “Grassman rumored-beast,” a sadness that cannot be named but can be glimpsed at the edge of a photograph and can “draw everything into its shadowy stride.” That creature—part rumor, part inner weather—moves through the poem as the true inhabitant of this landscape. It gives form to the speaker’s earlier phrase: the sad souls of friends are “stretched / so far that the tension is almost shouting / fill me, fill me.” Loneliness here is not stillness but a stretching that is nearly audible.
The significance of “Nebraska” lies in its refusal to make rural emptiness picturesque. The poem takes a familiar American road narrative and turns it inward, where the long drive across state lines becomes indistinguishable from emotional endurance. The final list—“Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio”—is not escaped but continuous, a flat sequence of names that reads like the next refill, the next clinic, the next stretch of road. Nebraska is the continued drive, the speaker says, and the definition is double: the state is motion and also the inability to stop or arrive. By the end, the central insight is less that Nebraska is empty than that emptiness has a body, a cost, and a direction.