This is what truly great writers - the great journalists, novelists, poets, playwrights - always do: They know their communities from the inside out, as full members, and they tell the truth about what they know. This collection of poems is a memoir about Alabama that transcends but does not neglect the public ugliness, the "tired old men who've made up their minds" and set against everything "young and swift." It is a family story filled with love, tenderness and forgiveness, that rises above the noise and into the mind and soul, evoking another landscape, both of feeling and place.