Vagrant Grace

David Bottoms has a breathtaking ability to capture human tenderness, vulnerability, and cruelty in the brief turn of a line. Grounded in the contemporary South, his poems often witness people in their moments of failure, as their fantasies and families collapse around them, as they weep at gravesides, as they recognize their own fading image in the bathroom mirror.

"One cannot read Bottoms without being nerve-touched by his sardonic yet compassionate country-man's voice, his hunter's irony....