Gary Lemons is a man who has worked most of his life with his hands. His discovery is that the act of writing poetry is little different than the act of building any structure. In the same way farmers contour a field in their imagination as they shape it with implements, Lemons explains, so do poets create with the mind and hand in harness. Lemons spent two years at the Undergraduate Poetry Workshop at the University of Iowa, studying poetry with Donald Justice, Norman Dubie, and former Poet Laureate Marvin Bell. Here he learned the suitable lessons that would later serve as foundation for insights wrangled from experience. He spent six years on the Assiniboine reservation in Wolf Point, Montana and is an honorary member of the Assiniboine tribe.