David Bottoms

"In these fourteen new poems, Bottoms draws us deeply into what Flannery O'Connor called "the Christ-haunted South." Bottoms' country is a region braced for apocalypse, a place where the spirit sweeps mysteriously across a landscape of burger joints, bass lakes, graveyards, and garbage dumps. These poems demonstrate the quirky nature of revelation."--Jacket.

"In the brief turn of a line David Bottoms reveals "the talent the world shows for mystery." Following in a rich literary tradition his poems are rooted both in the details of life in the contemporary American South and in a history scorched by violence. His portrayals of human tenderness, vulnerability, and cruelty, blur the divisions between good and evil."--BOOK JACKET.

Set in Macon, Georgia, this novel-length character study covers three days in the life of "nice guy" Connie Holtzclaw, small-time prizefighter and would-be dreamer turned kidnapper. Connie and his older brother Carl, the mastermind behind the scheme, kidnap and hold a rich college kid for $200,000 ransom. With his hoped-for cut of the money, Connie intends to lure Rita, his waitress-girlfriend, to Montana to start a new life together. As dark events unfold, Connie's naivete is juxtaposed against a reality of double murder and betrayal.

"In his tenth collection, David Bottoms recalls his childhood in Georgia with cinematic scope and linguistic precision"--Back cover.

An anthology of poems by American poets born since 1940.

Rooted in the customs of Southern families and peopled with undertakers, bluegrass musicians, daughters practicing karate, and elderly parents, David Bottoms' poems are generous, insightful, and lean headlong into familial wisdom. Past and present interweave with grandmothers spitting tobacco juice, ponds "filled with construction runoff," and the boyhood home-site paved over for a KFC. This is Bottoms' most personal and heartbreaking book.