Murder Ballad

On one hand Murder Ballad is a fierce critique of Jane Springer's Southern inheritance, on the other these poems quickly reveal the enigmatic beauty and sharply ironic humor contained in the still-relevant colloquialisms that often shape her characters. Her loose definitions of Southern-isms are the jumping-off place for the masterful poet as she leaps, narrates, and redefines the American South. From "Pretty As You Please" Then when you're nightfishing the Mississippi & catching a bucket of nothing, lonely as a single barge weeping its rust in the water--you see them--on a bridge above you, hair slick as frogskin& glittering from skinny dipping-- as in bucknaked & necking--& suddenly the moon is an empty jar of mayo. Jane Springer's first book Dear Blackbird (University of Utah Press, 2007) won the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize. Her other awards include an AWP Intro Prize, the Robert Penn Warren Prize for Poetry, an NEA fellowship, and a Whiting Writers Award. She teaches poetry at Hamilton College in upstate New York, where she lives with her husband, son, and two dogs. Her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from such places as Fugue, Oxford American, and The Southern Review.

Review :
"I have a feeling Jane Springer met the devil at the crossroads. There's not a note she can't pluck, and the music is like no one else's: rich as the red clay of Georgia, startling as a raccoon's bite, 'crazy as a shithouse rat' and cool as sweet tea on a sultry afternoon. There's some nittygritty here, hauled up from the freezer chest on the porch, unearthed like a mastodon that's been buried far longer than we can imagine. And there is tremendous vitality and sublimity in this 'dark county of the heart' where her music comes from. Whatever devilish bargain has been struck, it has been a boon to all parties. Hallelujah for us all." --D.A. Powell "Not since I read James Agee's A Death in the Family have I been so compelled to stare into the eyeballs of chiggers and mildew. Jane Springer is on a thin reed in the present moment reciting incantatory poems. May I plainly say, 'What a goddamn beautiful book this is.'" --Jane Miller "Jane Springer's poems are dazzling, devastating and utterly original--sound-rich, sensual, sensational--you will be carried away." --Naomi Shihab Nye "[Murder Ballad] is a tangled ode to the South, filled with coon stew, frog guts, pig shit, the violence of rape, slavery, and regret. Springer wrote it with the deep, sisterly love of a drunken, wayward brother she knows better than anyone." --Ploughshares "Traversing the despair of the rural south, Springer exploits the urgency and dread of every keening murder ballad, showing how that cleaving is both our undoing and our salvation." --Rain Taxi "Springer shows time and again that this music is an inheritance, the murder ballad that dwells in 'the dark county of the heart, ' and her poems hold the tension of wanting 'to erase the ancient, violent beauty / in the devil of not loving what we love.'" --Phantom Limb