Ecstatic in the Poison
by Andrew Hudgins

In his sixth book of poetry, Ecstatic in the Poison, National Book Award-finalist Andrew Hudgins offers a host of delights. Long known as a composer of innovative, clear-sighted narratives and hard-driving, truth-telling lyrics, Hudgins now digs deep into the biographical and autobiographical, the lyric and dramatic, the comic and elegiac.

Drawing on events of childhood and of later years, as well as the real and imagined lives of others, Hudgins brings to life a rich, comedic, and haunting variety of characters. In Hudgins's adroit hands, a lake, and even a joke, become personified.

Accessible, engaging, evocative, and entertaining, Ecstatic in the Poison is Hudgins at the height of his power.

"Ecstatic in the Poison is full of intelligence, vitality, and grace. And there is a beautiful oddness about it. Dark moments seem charged with an eerie luminosity and the most humdrum events assume a startling lyric intensity. A deep resonant humor is everywhere, and everywhere is amazing."
— Mark Strand

"Andrew Hudgins is a natural storyteller. . . . The surfaces of Hudgins's poems—their quirky economy, the sheer music of his prosody—are so right because he goes so deep."
— Rita Dove, Washington Post

Hudgins's strengths—his narrative skill, his accessible and lively conversational diction, his Everyman relatability— sure make him a progeny of Frost's."
— Brett Foster, Boston Poetry Review

"Though already a major American poet, Andrew Hudgins keeps betting better. . . . I can think of no other living poet who is as gracefully ferocious as Hudgins."
— Alan Michael Parker