Heaven’s Burning Porch: Poems
James Dunlap
TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series: Arkansas
In Heaven’s Burning Porch, James Dunlap reckons with the legacy left to him: one of pain, gratitude, violence, and salvation. In turns dark, humorous, lyric and narrative, Heaven’s Burning Porch explores what it means to grow up in rural Arkansas under the weight of his rough inheritance.
“In Heaven’s Burning Porch, James Dunlap writes of a hardscrabble childhood deep in a fever dream of Arkansas where stars burn like ‘nibs of bone. . . in a black rag’ and ponds fester ‘like a cup of water in a charred turtle shell.’ The landscape is alive in this book, and often seething, not just a backdrop but a character itself. It is a place laden with inexorable violence, often unleashed by fathers onto sons who ‘never talk about the roughhewn hours /spent in the grip of rougher men.’ Dunlap’s poems have been hammered out at that old crossroads of the brutal and the beautiful. They light up the darkness like a tree ‘broke out in a rash of flames.’ Read this stunning debut. It will wound you in the best of ways.
—Brian Barker, author of Vanishing Acts
James Dunlap is an Arkansas poet and butcher. He studied creative writing at the University of Arkansas and Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. His poems have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Nashville Review, Copper Nickel, The Journal, and storySouth. He is the author of the chapbook Hunter and He Dog Up a Holler.
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