Fall sanctuary

About this book

"These poems demand to know whether joy, reverence, gratitude and company can exist with fullness in an age that privileges irony suspicion, cynicism and ridicule. Is there, in fact, a "genuine" face behind the faces we prepare to meet the faces others have prepared for us to meet? For the reader tired of being told the world is nothing more than constructs and fictions, Hardin asks, "Oh why don't we admit we're exhausted?/It takes great effort not to shout for joy when we see each other." Out of the rural south - replete with flower-robbed graves and bottomlands, hog pens and the voice of Keith Whitley - Hardin quietly reinvigorates poetry's claim for intimacy, with the natural world, with language, and even with the mind hearing itself think - a relational and collective intimacy that is, at its core, celebratory, hopeful, and willingly vulnerable. Such is Hardin's sanctuary, with hymns and prayers voiced unabashedly."--Jacket.