Southern Tongues Leave Us Shining

(Paperback)

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Winner of the 2016 Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award, Southern Tongues Leave Us Shining explores the South and its history through the eyes of the living, the dead, and the inbetween.

Reviews

Language is the fire that survives us, Mark Wagenaar writes, and we are seared gladly by his brilliant flames. A pilgrim in the Christ-haunted South, as Flannery OConnor describes it, these poems reckon with the sins of history and the human-made scars on the natural world. The songs of Charles Wright, Rilke, and Blind Willie Johnson have tuned Wagenaars ear, but the music is his own, irresistibly so. Southern Tongues Leave Us Shining is a brave and difficult grappling, ending with the difficult joy of a childs birth and the worlds subsequent remaking. This is, simply put, poetry that adds to the glory of the human endeavor.Beth Ann Fennelly, Poet Laureate of Mississippi, author of Heating & Cooling

In Southern Tongues Leave Us Shining, there is a rapturous beauty that encompasses the American South, the United States, and the world, a poetic rooted in the space around the poet and extending outward to the world with questioning, compassion, grief, and hope. The lines have an aching eloquence bustling with a truer Southern verve, one recognizable by those who know it and appreciable by those who have yet to know it. There are many lines in this collection that take me up in a swoop and carry me along the terrain of now and never.Afaa M. Weaver, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; final judge of the 2016 Benjamin Saltman Award

Author Bio

Mark Wagenaar is the author of The Body Distances (A Hundred Blackbirds Rising), (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016). He is the 2014 winner of the Pinch Poetry Award, the New Letters Poetry Prize, and the Mary C. Mohr Poetry Prize, as well as the 2013 winner of the James Wright Poetry Prize, the Poetry International Prize, and the Yellowwood Poetry Prize. Wagenaars poems have been published or accepted by 32 Poems, Field, Image, The Missouri Review, Ninth Letter, Shenandoah, Subtropics, and Washington Square. He teaches at Valparaiso University and lives in Valparaiso, Indiana.