Robert Morgan has long been one of this country's finest poets. Now he shows that his hand is just as steady in fiction.

There is comfort and humor in Morgan's evocation of country people trying to survive.

At their finest, his stripped-down and almost primitive sentences burn with the raw, lonesome pathos of Hank Williams's best songs.

[Robert Morgan] is a seasoned author whose prose reads like poetry and whose nonfiction reads like novels... His books teach and inspire. He gives the past, with all its heroes and villains, a new life, if not a new purpose.

One of Robert Morgan's chief claims on our attention is the backbone he puts into the backcountry lore that grounds his work, the stately proprieties and meditative gravity he hews out of the hardscrabble folkways of his native Blue Ridge Mountains... His is a fine-grained, self-implicating intelligence that can span the intricacies of both pine resin and pantoums.