American Rendering（ISBN=9780547249629）

American Rendering showcases twenty-four new poems as well as a generous selection from Andrew Hudgins's seven previous volumes, spanning a distinguished career of more than twenty-five years. Hudgins, who was born in Texas and spent most of his childhood in the South, is a lively and prolific poet who draws on his vivid Southern and, more specifically, Southern Baptist, childhood. Although he was influenced by writers such as John Crowe Ransom, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and James Dickey, Hudgins has developed a distinctively descriptive form of the Southern Gothic imagination. His poems are rich with religious allusions, irreverent humor, and at times are inflected with a dark and violent eroticism. Of his most recent collection, Ecstatic in the Poison, Mark Strand wrote: " It] 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 amazing."

NEW POEMS
  My Daughter 
  Mother 
  Accelerator 
  Lorraine's Song 
  Walking a True Line 
  Everything Before "Happy" Is True 
  After Teaching 
  Under the Horse 
  The Blind Woman's Orchid 
  Abandoning the Play 
  A Handful of Keys 
  Blowfly
  Outside the Inn 
  Came Back 
  The Circus 
  Cicada 
  The Names of the Lost 
  Courtesy 
  The Afterimage of a Ghost 
  The Bluebird, Singing, Leaps into the Sky 
  Epithalamium 
  American Rendering 
  Lightning Strike in Paradise 
FROM SAINTS AND STRANGERS (1985)
  The Persistence of Nature in Our Lives 
  The Choice the Driver Makes 

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