Lessons in Ruin

In his debut full-length collection, award-winning Missouri poet Justin Hamm examines the all-too-often-ignored Midwestern experience through narratives rife with all the humor and heartbreak and hard-luck grit of honest-to-God, everyday life. The rural child contemplates running his hands over a Van Gogh painting. The mechanic lets his daughter skip school to help work on the truck. The matriarch's sense of duty is so great it temporarily staves off terminal illness. The father battles his food addiction for love of his children. Such poems as these, set alongside Hamm's musical meditations on his home region's exterior and interior landscapes of ruin, create a portrait of a place that can be as unforgiving as it is fertile but also as holy as it is harsh.