The Book of Hulga speculates with humor, tenderness, and a brutal precision on a character that Flannery O Connor envisioned but did not live long enough to write: the angular intellectual proud woman approaching God inch by inch with ground teeth. These striking poems look to the same sources that O Connor sought out, from Gerard Manley Hopkins to Edgar Allan Poe to Simone Weil. Original illustrations by Julie Franki further illuminate Reese s imaginative verse biography of a modern-day hillbilly saint.