Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following journals, where these poems first found a home (sometimes in different form under different titles):
American Literary Review: “Americana” and “Interesting Case”; Bellingham Review: “Regarding Symbols”; Cimarron Review: “Junk”; Cumberland River Review: “Elegy for George Garrett” and “Rain Crow”; Grist: “Farm Portrait”; Image: “William Eggleston” and “Smokers, Sunday Morning, 1975”; Shenandoah: “Elizabeth Patton, Wife of Davy Crockett,” “Lost Highway,” and “Social History”; Southern Review: “The Principal’s Son,” “I Will Not Talk in Class,” “Purple Martin Village,” and “Last Words”; Southwest Review: “Second Row at the Ballet”; Tar River Poetry: “A Book by Its Cover”; Toad: “Essay on Friendship”; 32 Poems: “Spring Recital, Beethoven Club, Memphis, Tenn.,” “Abandoned Homesite in a Field,” and “Primitive Baptist.”
“Smokers, Sunday Morning, 1975” was printed as a limited-edition broadside for the Beall Poetry Festival at Baylor University. “William Eggleston” and “Lost Highway” appeared in The Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol. VI: Tennessee, Texas Review Press, 2013.
I am grateful for the support of the Walter E. Dakin Fellowship at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Union University provided a research leave that allowed me to complete the manuscript. Several poems got their start during residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. But none of these lines comes into being without the patience of my family, and without their love.