Keith Wilson's Foreward to Staked Plains:
These poems speak with authenticity about a sweep of land that extends from the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in New Mexico to the Texas seacoast at Corpus Christi. It is one of the longest, highest plains in the United States and to those of us, like Bill Dodd, who were raised on it, there is a special magic in spite of its toughness. The land there is tough and it breeds tough people. In winter the winds swirl down from the North bearing ice-storms and snow. In summer thunderheads march forward on bolts of lightning and the winds of springtime can turn the sky into hammered copper.
The term "staked plains" is a direct translation from the original Spanish name given centuries ago – Llano Estacado. ("Stockaded Plains" would be another translation, calling up the image of the plains as a fortress or a prison.) Only tough people, especially in the old days, survived, much less made a living there.
These are the people, mainly his family, about whom Bill writes so well in his well-crafted, paced poems. Bill catches in the faces and voices of these men and women the very tone and vision of West Texas in all its richness and color. The structures within the poems move and shift like the land itself – there doesn't always seem to be obvious causation. Things just happen on the Llano; sometimes a man knows why but oftentimes he does not. Events seemed that way to a lot of people who built their homesteads, their small towns, and dreamed of a better and easier life – only to have the land reject them, their crops, empty their towns, leaving only graves and clapboard shacks with empty windows to mark their passages. Bill captures this fatalism along with the stubbornness that drove his people as they coped with the harshness of their lives on the Staked Plains.
Like many of those people, Staked Plains is honest, hard, and a good introduction to the work of Bill Dodd. I personally look forward to many more books from one of the fines writers I’ve met in many a year. – Keith Wilson

Staked Plains came out in 1987 so this reading at the Living Batch Bookstore in Albuququerque must have been then.