Poetry. ARMORED HEARTS, combining new poems with a selection from previous volumes, offers the power of idiomatic narrative at its naked best. David Bottoms presents dramatic stories in rich language falling in natural and captivating cadences; he brings us into the terrain of ruin and hope and beauty, reminding us again and again that it is our own temporal reality, not the real world, that is fragile.

Author City: MARIETTA, GA USA

David Bottoms has served as Georgia's Poet Laureate since 2000, and was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2009. He teaches at Georgia State University, co- edits Five Points magazine, and lives in Marietta, Georgia. His first book, Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump, won the Walt Whitman Award. Since, he has received such awards as the Ingram Merrill Award, Poetry magazine's Levinson Prize, the 1999 Georgia Author of the Year Award from the Georgia Writers Association, the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Additionally, he has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.