Poetry. HAMS BENEATH THE FIRMAMENT, Terri Ford's second books of poems, is a portrait-at-a-gallop, a series of drive-by rhymes, a lively foray into the "jello of elsewhere". It is a book with sex, with budgies, with kissing the dead and with Midwestern livelihoods, with "counting asymptomatic / years." It proceeds via Tarantino subplots, gonorrhea, and the absent angels who Ford simply won't allow to remain AWOL. A more rambunctious collection of poems does not exist, its "inkity blue" skies and "the way the wild-eyed speak // of the rapture" spectacularly its own. HAMS BENEATH THE FIRMAMENT is liable to sprout feathers or wingspan as you read it. Original in its descriptions, and allowing pause for reflection amongst its rollercoaster of visions, HAMS BENEATH THE FIRMAMENT is a tour-de-force collection.

Miss Terri Ford is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She's been a fellow at Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, a summer resident of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown through the Ohio Arts Council, and the recipient of several grants. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Conduit, Agni and many other journals. She is the author of Why the Ships Are She (Four Way, 2001) and Hams Beneath the Firmament (Four Way, 2007).