Joel Fry's poems chart a deeply interior quest. Though the object is predictable-understanding, love, friendship, hope-the poems are highly original. Deep within, where external and internal landscape merge, where easy solutions like monetary success and comfortable suburbia go down before a sharp irony, we meet fleeting memories of a childhood farm, a creek beside which boys played, rare moments of love where a couple sits on a porch. We also meet loneliness, despair, glimpses of truth, and a pervasive joy in the act of creation. The poems are disciplined, intuitive, paradoxical, richly imagined-repaying, over and over, the attention and agility required of those who would follow the poet. Fry leaves us "poised on the edge of a mystery / [we] cannot command, a chorus [we] cannot escape." Harry Moore, author of Time's Fool and Bearing the Farm Away

Alabama focuses on a boy from a rural, fundamentalist community who becomes a pacifist, feminist, and existentialist poet. Labyrinth, meditation, fable, and peasant poem, formed from interleaved strands of prose vignettes and lineated poetry, this collection is at once a tale of cultural exile and familial loyalty, and an unflinching look at regional shame that doubles as a love story, all expressed with the intimate voice and vision of Rodney Jones.

Collected poems from the lifetime body of work of Helen Friedman Blackshear, the eighth poet laureate of the state of Alabama.