Sparrow

"What struck me first when I read Sparrow, straight through from beginning to end because I could not stop reading, was the quiet aliveness and sensuality of the poems. The subjects are simple, direct: rural childhood, its rusted pick-ups, brushfires, and dust. There are children who long to be horses, and horses who bend their necks like young lovers, the fires of early adulthood and a delicate sexuality, religion and its "Pentecostal wind." And then comes the waitress with her name tag, marriage, children. Almost clich . But it is the sense of reverie that keeps us there, in that country where what is familiar becomes, under the hand of the poet, foreign and extraordinary."

-Dorianne Laux, from the Foreword