Heaven's Burning Porch: Poems

The TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series: Arkansas

In Heaven’s Burning Porch, James Dunlap reckons with the legacy left to him: one of pain, gratitude, violence, and salvation. In turns dark, humorous, lyric and narrative, Heaven’s Burning Porch explores what it means to grow up in rural Arkansas under the weight of his rough inheritance.

from “A Good Year for Pecans”
—Central Arkansas, April

The plum trees are wearing their crowns of thorn again
and the clouds that hang like shreds of dr...