The Coal Life: Poems

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments I am forever grateful to the following people: William Logan, Debora Greger, Michael Hofmann, Sidney Wade, Jim Mersmann, Bob Collins, Tony Crunk, Enid Shomer, Rebecca Bach, Mark Jeffreys, Danny Anderson, Greg Fraser, Tina Harris, Jim Paxson, Manny Blacksher, Jim Owens, Rob Short, Allen Jih, Jason Slatton, Alan Shapiro, Claudia Emerson, Mary Jo Salter, Wyatt Prunty, my Sewanee family, my UF family, my UAB family, and the Vines, Ferguson, and Paddock families— especially the storytellers: Aunt Frances, Uncle Frank, Aunt Norma, Granddaddy, and Grandmother. I would like to thank the editors of the following publications in which some of these poems originally appeared. 32 Poems, “Toilet Flowers”; The American Poetry Journal, “La Mar es una Puta”; Apalachee Review, “Red Mountains”; Aura, “Path,” “Ashes and Dust,” “Mantrip,” “The Other Woman”; The Chariton Review, “Worm Grunters,” “After Bloody Mary’s Death,” “The Baptist Steeple,” “Tracks”; The Cincinnati Review, “The Old Salt’s Brag”; Controlled Burn, “On Speaking with an Old Classmate after his Physics Lecture at a Local University”; A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry, “Hamlet Beside the Stream”; Family Matters: Poems of Our Families, “Grabbing”; Flint Hills Review, “Some Like It Hot”; The Greensboro Review, “Back Door”; Hunger Mountain, “Magritte’s Daemon”; Iron Horse Literary Review, “Mountain of Fire”; Isotope, “Coaxing the Coal Back to Life”; Kennesaw Review, “Darwin Dreams of the Second Coming”; The Literary Review, “Gauguin’s Bed”; Louisiana Literature, “Reclamation”; Mêlée, “Epilogue and Return”; Meridian, “Methane”; Natural Bridge, “Mine Rats”; New Delta Review, “Brick Hammer and Broken Watch,” vii “Tulips and Pigs”; North American Review, “Eden’s Oranges”; Poet Lore, “Threat of Spring”; Post Road, “Charter,” “Floundering”; Santa Clara Review, “Putting the Mule Out to Pasture,” “Burying the Dead,” “Return”; Sewanee Theological Review, “Elegy for Jessica Hayden,” “The Fox”; The South Carolina Review, “Almost Clean”; South Dakota Review, “Offerings,” “Take Over”; Southern Indiana Review, “Stake Horse”; storySouth, “Overburden”; Tampa Review, “I Wake to Find I Am Not Awake”; The Texas Review, “The Motel Room”; Third Coast, “Georg Cantor, from Halle Sanatorium, 1884”; Unsplendid, “The Cleaving.” viii ...