Back to the Future: Four Poets Traverse History

David Kirby is the author of more than two dozen volumes of criticism, essays, children’s literature,  and pedagogy. He has published 12 collections of poetry including The Biscuit Joint; Get Up, Please; The Ha-Ha, short-listed for the Griffin Poetry Prize and The House on Boulevard St., a finalist for the National Book Award. His poetry has been featured in numerous anthologies, including several issues of Best American Poetry. Like Kirby's previous collections More Than This (LSU Press) is shot through with the roadhouse fervor of early rock 'n' roll. Yet these rollicking poems also contain an oceanic feeling more akin to the great symphonies of Europe than the three-minute singles of the rock pioneers, as Kirby seeks to startle, to please, to unwind the knots that we get ourselves into and make it possible to being anew. Little goes unnoticed in these poems: death, love, friendship, food, religious ardor, and philosophical skepticism, nights on the town and quiet evenings at home are all present. In More Than This, Kirby takes readers back in time and out in space, offering quiet wisdom and a sense of the endless possibilities that are and life gives us all.

John Balaban is the author of thirteen books of poetry and prose, including four volumes which together have won The Academy of American Poets’ Lamont prize, a National Poetry Series Selection, and two nominations for the National Book Award. His Locusts at the Edge of Summer: New and Selected Poems won the 1998 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. He was named the 2001-2004 National Artist for the Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society. In 2003, he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2008, he was awarded a medal from the Vietnamese Ministry of Culture for his work in translation and digital preservation of ancient texts. In 2017, he received the George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature from the Associated Writing Programs. In addition to writing poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, he is a translator of Vietnamese poetry, and a past president of the American Literary Translators Association. His new book of poetry, Empires (Quail Ridge Books) is about tremors in history as imperial eras come to their ends, those interludes when the understood order of things has changed. The poems move through time, around the world, and across the U.S.A.

Lola Haskins is the author of twelve books of poetry and three of prose. Her poetry titles include How Small, Confronting Morning (2016); and the Florida Book Awards winners The Grace to Leave (2012), and Still, the Mountain (2010). Her prose writings include Fifteen Florida Cemeteries, Strange Tales Unearthed (2011) Among her honors are the Iowa Poetry Prize, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, several awards for narrative poetry, and the Emily Dickinson Prize from Poetry Society of America. Asylum: Improvisations on John Claire (Pitt) presents the kind of journey John Clare might have taken in 1841 if, when he escaped the madhouse, he'd been traveling in his head rather than on his feet. Lola Haskins starts out with as little sense of direction as Clare had, and yet, after wandering all over the map, she too finally reaches her destination. The four sections in this book are where she rests for the night. The first looks tenderly at the cycle of human life. The second renders the world around her as if she were painting it. By the third, having lost her way, she turns to the supernatural and in the process is sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. The book ends as she finds it again and arrives in her dear north-west England, having learned from John Clare that she “can be homeless at home and half-gratified to find I can be happy anywhere.”

Sean Sexton was born in Indian River County and grew up on his family's Treasure Hammock Ranch. He divides his time between taking care of a 700-acre cow-calf operation, painting, and writing. He is married to artist, Sharon Sexton, and they live on the ranch in a house they built on the ranch. Sexton has kept daily journal-sketch and writing books since 1973. He is author of Blood Writing, Poems, (2010); The Empty Tomb (2014), and Descent (2018). He has performed and presented at the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada, The Miami Book Fair International, O' Miami, and Other Words Arts Literary Conference in Tampa, FL. “This is my second volume of poetry,” Sexton said about May Darkness Restore (Press53), “written in late middle age, drawn upon my life and experience as an artist, writer, and cattleman. … I have been involved in Florida's cattle industry since I was a child […] on land we’ve held for 76 years. The poetry embraces mortality and the cycles of life, connections to family, the elements, vagaries of the muse, balance of manual labor and artistic realization and the ongoing wonder and difficulty of leading a pastoral life in the new millennium.”