Out now in 3 formats!
In the Bewilderment
In the Bewilderment is a contemplative collection of poems rooted in the tallgrass prairie of Kansas, where walking becomes a form of attention, contemplation, and discovery. In the prairie’s grasses, birds, weather, creeks, and changing seasons, Ryan Kegley finds not escape from the unsettled world but a way of looking more closely at it.
The poems move between solitude and companionship, wonder and grief, spiritual longing and uncertainty. They consider mortality and aging, environmental loss and development, technology and responsibility, and the complicated desire to belong somewhere without possessing it. Some begin with the smallest observations—a bird, a flower, a change in the weather—and widen toward questions of faith, stewardship, community, and what we owe to the places that sustain us.
Across four sections, In the Bewilderment asks what might happen when we slow down enough to notice what is already here: the wildness that persists, the damage we have done, the beauty we might overlook, and the fragile connections that bind us to one another and to the more-than-human world.
These poems are an invitation to pay attention—to the prairie, to one another, and to the life unfolding around us.
Publisher: NatureCulture (August 1, 2026)
Standard Edition
Length: 110 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-960293-28-2 (Hardcover) $29.99
ISBN-13: 978-1-960293-27-5 (Paperback) $19.99
Kansas Land Trust Edition
Length: 116 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-960293-30-5 (Paperback) $24.99
Includes a bonus poem not in the Standard Edition
Proceeds support Kansas Land Trust
Praise for In the Bewilderment
Ryan Kegley’s In the Bewilderment leads us through prairie trails that transcribe meadowlarks and blazing stars, wild turkeys and sweet pea, bison and sun goldening the grasses. These poems call to mind Dickinson’s “forever is composed of nows” as they hold a deep attention to each moment, reminding us that the heart can also be an organ of listening. There are journeys to the edge of the earth and lyrics built on short hills, but always there is grace and gratitude for the small beauties of this world. Here, the wild grasses renew us and the birds carol the seasons, these moving meditations remind us that walking is its own form of stillness. Kegley has learned the lessons of profoundly loving and stewarding a landscape and its ecosystem, and his poems are here to invite us to stay awhile, breathe out, listen, and let go.
—Traci Brimhall
Kansas Poet Laureate, 2023–2026
· · ·
Through his poetry, Ryan captures the immense power of the prairie and the critical importance of developing a reciprocal relationship with the land. Through his stewardship and prose of Willis Prairie, one of the few remaining tallgrass prairies, we are reminded that land conservation is a responsibility we all must participate in to ensure stories of connectedness continue to resonate with and inspire future generations.
—Kaitlin Stanley
Executive Director, Kansas Land Trust
· · ·
Ryan Kegley has rooted his life inside one of the smallest remaining ecosystems in the country—the tallgrass prairie. With open heart and pen in hand, he wanders the preserve, attending to a place most people look past, rendering it through deeply moving eloquence. The result is In the Bewilderment. His work reminds us what it means to quiet our thoughts, to belong somewhere, and to honor the yearning that lives inside us. The poems gathered here are psalms, many of them moored to his life on the prairie. In them you will find celebrations of the simple, radical act of being alive.
—Nathaniel Wilder
Award-winning photographer & filmmaker
· · ·
This is a book for the bedside or the kitchen table with a view of a bird feeder. [Ryan] Kegley’s sane voice comes through the words in friendship. He makes a good companion in a time of automated and artificial communication.
—Denise Low
Kansas Poet Laureate Emerita, 2007–2009
from her foreword, “Being of the Moment”
· · ·
In the Bewilderment by Ryan Kegley sings his and our place in the world. It connects to our sacred bond to wild nature through a series of meditative and confessional poems. His first collection proves him a worthy poet as he has built poems that stand against the brilliance of our destruction of the wild, against “the creep of tract housing,” against the agony of “the pavement poured into a dead end.” Kegley takes the reader to the edge of that world and into a more sacred one that transports us and asks us to slow down and listen. If we do, we will hear what truly matters: wilderness, wildness, and purest self.
—Dr. Paul Brooke
Poet Laureate of Iowa and author of Finding Meteorites in Antarctica
from The Milk House, August 8, 2026