Poetry. Rooted in the customs of Southern families and peopled with undertakers, bluegrass musicians, daughters practicing karate, and elderly parents, David Bottoms's 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's most personal and heartbreaking book. "David Bottoms's poems just get better and better"—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

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.