70 pages / 6.00 x 9.00 inches / no illustrations
Poetry / American-General | Poetry / Nature | Poetry / Family
Written almost exclusively in traditional, modified, and nonce forms, the poems in Lures renegotiate grief, trauma, southern masculinities, and fatherhood with unflinching resolve. This new collection by Adam Vines draws much of its subject matter and imagery from fishing, revealing how close observations of species, spawning cycles, predation and feeding patterns, underwater topographies, water clarity, and lure choice reflect larger themes of what it means to be lured through memories of those who have passed and those who remain present.
With Lures, Vines proposes that by reconstructing the stories from our past, we gain a greater understanding of our cultural identities and inheritances from those who made an impact on our lives.
Adam Vines is associate professor of English and director of creative writing at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He is the author of three collections of poetry, including Out of Speech, and coauthor of two collections. His work has appeared in Poetry, the Kenyon Review, and the Southern Review, among other journals.
“Adam Vines is a rare find—an avid fisherman, he’s a poet with a penchant for sonic texture, orchestrating music from a workingman’s palette of plumb lines and trowels, lures and bait twitching on the trotline. Up from red Alabama clay, these are poems you’d least expect together—ekphrastic responses to Bosch alongside tender (and often hilarious) epistles to a young daughter; wordplay romps alongside elegies for a magic-making uncle with ‘his liver gone, his gut give up.’ Under it all is an abiding attention, the kind that evokes the nests of dirt dauber wasps as ‘organ pipes upon the eaves,’ the tongue of a trapped rat snake as ‘a Bible’s ribbon,’ mourning doves with ‘swollen breasts,’ ‘whinnying / on wires.’ By turns elegant and salt-of-the-earth, gorgeously elevated and shit-talking vernacular, here is a collection wrought by a man who knows exactly how to use the tools of both the hand and mind to make words sing.”
—Nickole Brown, author of Sister
“Masterful but always charming, the poems of Adam Vines’s Lures are poems on the water—with a landscape of loss and bounty and an art of patience and discovery. Vines gives us love poems and elegies attuned to a natural world that refuses to offer up the old consolations, but instead shows a vision—shimmering and alive—just beneath the surface.”
—Richie Hofmann, author of Second Empire
“Reading the work of Adam Vines I am reminded of Robert Frost’s admonition about the need of being versed in country things. To be so versed is to possess a knowledge that comes from experience. Vines passes along his knowledge and experience, from fishing to parenthood to the art of the elegy, in poetry of a high order.”
—Mark Jarman, author of Dailiness and The Heronry.
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