Jane Springer’s first book, Dear Blackbird, won the Agha Shahid Ali prize (University of Utah Press, 2007). Her other awards include an AWP Intro Prize, the Robert Penn Warren Prize for Poetry, an NEA grant, and a Whiting Award. She received her PhD from Florida State University in 2008 and now teaches poetry at Hamilton College in upstate New York. Her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming at Fugue, The Oxford American, and The Southern Review. (Author photo by Robin Caudell)
“Jane Springer’s poems are dazzling, devastating, and utterly original—sound-rich, sensual, sensational—you will be carried away.”
—Naomi Shihab Nye
“Not since I read James Agee’s A Death in the Family have I been so compelled to stare into the eyeballs of chiggers and mildew. Jane Springer is on a thin reed in the present moment reciting incantatory poems. May I plainly say, ‘What a goddamn beautiful book this is.’”
—Jane Miller
“I have a feeling Jane Springer met the devil at the crossroads. There’s not a note she can’t pluck, and the music is like no one else’s: rich as the red clay of Georgia, startling as a raccoon’s bite, ‘crazy as a shithouse rat’ and cool as sweet tea on a sultry afternoon. There’s some nittygritty here, hauled up from the freezer chest on the porch, unearthed like a mastodon that’s been buried far longer than we can imagine. And there is tremendous vitality and sublimity in this ‘dark county of the heart’ where her music comes from. Whatever devilish bargain has been struck, it has been a boon to all parties. Hallelujah for us all.”
—D. A. Powell
Alice James Books
