KILLING THE MURNION DOGS

Poetry. KILLING THE MURNION DOGS, Joe Wilkins's first full-length collection, is a series of elegies. Herein we grieve years and fathers, highways and memories, rivers, shotgun shacks, and myths. These poems sing us down the two-lane highways and backroads of the vast American interior, from the hard-luck plains of eastern Montana to the cypress swamps of the Mississippi Delta, yet KILLING THE MURNION DOGS refuses the easy answers of nostalgia or cynicism. Rather, these poems insist that we "remember the good pain," that despite it all "this dust here is home." And so we search—always, insistently—for a place to abide inside the loss. "It is time to grieve," Wilkins tells us, "to believe in the world again.

"The most striking component of it is its awareness of 'the whole world.' What is ordinary becomes transcendent. In places derelict and seemingly unexceptional, Wilkins compels us to recognize what is worth salvage, worth praise."—Deborah Kim, Indiana Review