These poems explore desire in its many forms—sensual, emotional, intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual—confronting an infinite cosmos, existential separateness and vulnerability, violence, injustice, and death. This book enacts a running conversation with American cultural history, neuroscience, particle physics, religion, baseball, zoology, other poems and poets, jazz, blues, and zydeco, ranging through time and across New Mexico, Nevada, Louisiana, Virginia, and points in between and beyond.
JAY UDALL is the author of five previous books of poetry, including The Welcome Table, winner of the New Mexico Book Award. He teaches at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, Louisiana, where he also serves as poet-in-residence.
Now available in eBook!
“Jay Udall has composed a book haunted by violence, killing, war, and nature’s own disasters, daring us not to look away, yet also offering at our most sunken depths ‘a buoyancy from nowhere / lifting, some gravity pulling up.’ Amid ‘skin, scale, fur / and feather,’ through dirt and sky, although our species is ‘the kind who murder our own in schools and churches,’ Udall teaches us to love and praise creation: ‘the living work, the thick and quick of it.’ I am grateful for the precision and tenderness of this poet.”
Alicia Ostriker, author of Waiting for the Light
“Because a Fire in Our Heads is sublime revelation, a book of place poems set in ‘this house whose walls we’ve never found.’ Memory lives in this house, and love, and caverns of grief, as well as dislocation, and war, and death, and the terrible beauty of human passage. Jay Udall’s poems are lighted throughout by ‘thick profusions’ that might have ‘startled the air in spring.’ The book is a triumph.”
Darrell Bourque, former Louisiana Poet Laureate and author of Where I Waited
Now available in eBook!
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