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

Gripping storytelling, indelible sense of time and place... Morgan turns the stories of prosaic lives into page-turners.

Robert Morgan should be declared a national treasure.

Robert Morgan's poems are always exciting for their precise knowledge of country things, and of how things go in the world of natural fact and process. This new collection gives us also some delightful lore from the Southern mountains: we learn of the horse fiddle, and holy cussing, and the intrepid pastor who held off bear or panther with his umbrella.

If you grew up in the country or feel an affinity for the mountains, Morgan's [work] will bring you home again; if not, here is an authentic tour of the region.