Poetry. Clint McCown's DEAD LANGUAGES seems at times to be the technicolor before-sleep musings of an everyman, examining the minutiae of everyday life and the well-known mythologies of the small town. But McCown's eye is keen, and he sees that within every throwaway gesture, every forgotten exchange and every unappreciated moment is meaning and beauty. In this collection he struggles with the dead languages in his life, the heartbreaking impossibilities of communication. With his conversational tone and blunt, sardonic wit, McCown brings the reader into a world that is not too dissimilar from his or her own, but a world more vivid, more thoughtful, both lucid and fraught with doubt.

Clint McCown was born in Fayetteville , Tennessee and spent most of his youth in Birmingham , Alabama during the racial conflicts of the early 1960's. Before turning to fiction, he worked as a journalist in Montgomery , Alabama , earning an Associated Press Award for Documentary Excellence for his investigations of organized crime and corruption in Alabama politics. He has twice won the American Fiction Prize. His novel, The Member-Guest , received the Society of Midland Authors Award; his novel, War Memorials , was designated for Outstanding Achievement in Literature by the Wisconsin Library Association. His short stories and poems have appeared widely, and he has published two books of verse. He teaches in the creative writing program at Virginia Commonwealth University . In 2008, he published Dead Languages, a book of poems.