Alan Birkelbach: New and Selected Poems

Birkelbach writes of the Texas landscape and its people with conversational ease, making his vivid descriptions shimmer through each poem. He balances the ordinary and the phenomenal, the factual and the suppositional, the temporal and the eternal in poems remarkable for their depth of insight. As Billy Bob Hill writes in his introduction to the volume, Birkelbach can disguise a mosaic of word music in plain sight hidden in conversational English.