The Bottomland

Humes employs language that is always direct, full of zinnias and mine acid, bakery trucks, red-tailed hawks, and maggots. Out of these concrete images, he builds structural and emotional tensions that give his poems a powerful presence. Like the dirt of Pennsylvania hillsides, like pollen, like the leavings of a butterfly's wings, these poems remain on our hands and in our minds, affecting us long after the book is put down.