The Stack of Owls is Getting Higher

In a sequence of poems set in the mountainous Deep South of America, Dawn Watson vividly evokes an ominous landscape of gas stations, jackrabbits and drifting hawks, where copperhead snakes fall out of branches and ‘magnolia cones / thum[p] the roofs’ of wooden outhouses.

These poems, based on the writer’s time spent in Georgia, Tennessee and the Carolinas, are interwoven with pieces set in the poet’s native Belfast which speak urgently to the raw realities of sexuality, juvenile detention,...