On one hand Murder Ballad is a fierce critique of Jane Springer's
Southern inheritance, on the other these poems quickly reveal the
enigmatic beauty and sharply ironic humor contained in the
still-relevant colloquialisms that often shape her characters. Her loose
definitions of Southern-isms are the jumping-off place for the masterful
poet as she leaps, narrates, and redefines the American South.
From Pretty As You Please:
Then when you're nightfishing the Mississippi & catching a bucket of
nothing,
lonely as a single barge weeping its rust in the water--you see them--on
a
bridge above you, hair slick as frogskin& glittering from skinny
dipping--
as in bucknaked & necking--& suddenly the moon is an empty jar of mayo.
Jane Springer's first book Dear Blackbird (University of Utah
Press, 2007) won the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize. Her other awards
include an AWP Intro Prize, the Robert Penn Warren Prize for Poetry, an
NEA fellowship, and a Whiting Writers Award. She teaches poetry at
Hamilton College in upstate New York, where she lives with her husband,
son, and two dogs. Her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from
such places as Fugue, Oxford American, and The Southern Review.
