Otherworld, Underworld, Prayer Porch

David Bottoms

David Bottoms explores otherness, the death of parents, and private spirituality. Images of rural Georgia confront the changing landscape of his memories where he searches for refuge in quiet places of prayer. Rooted in nature, Bottoms’ poetry affirms the “tenuous ways tenderness seeps into the world” and the loneliness inherent in memory. Memory is “smoke off a damp fire” as Bottoms explores absence, a contemplative inner life, and changing landscapes.

Paperback: $16.00 list price

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Hardcover $20.00 list price

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ISBN: 9781556595202

Format: Paperback

ISBN: 9781556595363

Format: Hardcover

About the Author

David Bottoms (1949—2023) was the author of several books. His first book, Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump, was chosen by Robert Penn Warren as winner of the 1979 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. His poems have appeared widely in magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Poetry, and The Paris Review, as well as in sixty anthologies and textbooks. He is the author of eight other books of poetry, two novels, and …

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Reviews

“Bottoms’s poems are like dark rooms: we enter and exit through the same door, but we’re a little different on the way out…” —The Millions

“[Bottoms] makes astounding leaps of both faith and doubt, and does so with insight, honesty, and flashes of anger―all characteristic elements of his work.” ―Southern Review

“One finds here what one expects in a book of good Southern poems: clear narratives… evocative images, searching irony, and meditative poise.” ―Library Journal

“Bottoms’ poems do what the best poems have always done: They compel us to reread them. They linger in our minds. They alter our perception of the world.” ―Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“David Bottoms is brilliant in the clarity and richness of his language, profoundly humane in the breadth and compassion of his vision. He is quite simply one of the best poets writing today.” —Jane Hirshfield