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| Sewanee Writers' Series Publishes Eleventh Book
Ecstatic in the Poison offers readers a host of new poetic delights from the critically acclaimed poet. Though long-known as a composer of innovative, clear-sighted narratives and hard-driving lyrics, all written in unrhymed verse, Hudgins now gives us, in his sixth collection, not only what he's best known for, but also the surprise of rhyme. Throughout, Hudgins explores the biographical and autobiographical, the lyric and dramatic, and the comic and elegiac, by drawing on events of childhood and of later years, as well as an amusing and haunting variety of characters: among them, a prankster who disassembles a Cadillac and rebuilds it in his attic; Russian soldiers on the verge of execution; frenzied inhabitants of Sodom, along with middle-class husbands, wives, and children. Cameo appearances by God, Alexander the Great, and Josef Stalin lead the reader through the epochs, and in Hudgins's able hands a lake, and even a joke, become personified. Ecstatic in the Poison has been praised for its comic sensibility, narrative prowess, and lyric intensity. Pulitzer-prize winner Donald Justice says the new poems "have a certain hard brilliance that almost succeeds in hiding the surprising human softness," and Mark Strand writes that the poems "seem charged with an eerie luminosity, and the most humdrum events assume a startling lyric intensity." The Washington Post calls Hudgins "a natural storyteller," and adds that "the surfaces of Hudgins's poems—their quirky economy, the sheer music of his prosody—are so right because he goes so deep." Andrew Hudgins was awarded the 1989 Poets' Prize for After the Lost War. His other honors include the Alfred Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, the Witter Bynner Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Hanes Prize for Poetry from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. He teaches at Ohio State University. Established in 1998, and made possible through the Walter E. Dakin Memorial Fund, the Sewanee Writers' Series is a joint venture between the University of the South and The Overlook Press. |
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The Sewanee Writers' Series is pleased to announce the August 25th publication of its eleventh book, Andrew Hudgins's Ecstatic in the Poison.