After the Revival

Poetry. Winner of the 2008 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. Equal parts church hymnal and outlaw country album, Carrie Jerrell's AFTER THE REVIVAL exudes a reverence for all things run down and wrecked. From abandoned coal mines to overgrown cemeteries, to rivers full of leeches; from tornados to demolition derbies, to weddings gone wrong, the places and events explored in this dazzling debut collection give rise to playful, poignant meditations on the shifty limits of language, memory, faith, and love. Employing free verse as well as traditional verse forms, AFTER THE REVIVAL is full-throated, full-throttle poetry as technically nimble as it is unflinchingly voiced. It invites readers to celebrate the sacred, the secular, and the intersection of the two, and to sing "as if we weren't trapped on cinder blocks, but free"

"Carrie Jerrell is a poised, mature and brilliant poet. Her distinctive genius, what makes her unlike anybody else I know, is her ability to bring together such a heterogeneous mix of worlds and influences—to be open to everything formal and informal, profane and sacred, foreign and home grown."—from judge Alan Shapiro's Foreword

"The poems in this book are full of idiosyncratic wit, keen social intelligence and a kind of sass that makes great use of both the honey and the sting. That's pleasure enough to encounter, but add to this Jerrell's enviable formal assuredness and you have a book that announces a bright new voice to contemporary American poetry."—Erin Belieu

"AFTER THE REVIVAL is a book of rich, tightly-packed poems suffused with the grit, rueful humor and pain of American country music."—Dorianne Laux

"AFTER THE REVIVAL carefully mourns the vulnerability of rural America, from its people and their ways, to its small towns, to the land itself. There's a bell of desperation quietly ringing throughout this original and finely-observed book. Carrie Jerrell's poems are loaded with longing and anguish; they hit the page as homemade creations, gritty systems of memory and transformation, rough-hewn and vital."—Maurice Manning

"Carrie Jerrell's poems are as lyrically alive, intelligent, and unforgettable as Hank Williams's best songs. A lover of paradox like John Donne, and as formally sophisticated, she moves between the divine and the profane in the blink of an eye. You can't match this book for mature feeling and its rare, hopeful, sorrowing intelligence."—Tom Sleigh