Black Tupelo Country is a book of cinematic lushness
razored with ache. These poems dwell in the dark, mutable seam
between the natural and interior worlds. "Covenant," the book’s
first poem, is exactly that, a contract with the reader to
follow the writer into that indeterminate place between earth
and self: "because a woman’s body is a prophet,/ she sleeps
shivering by her husband in July" and dreams of a massasauga
snake that will slip in and out of the rest of the book in many
guises. When she rises she sees "our covenant," our contract
with our own mortality, figured as a "bitch" alternately licking
her pup and snarling. Here then is where we begin: stepping in
on a world at once familiar and mythical, particulate, real,
deeply snarled in the flora and fauna of language itself: "In
mating season, these nouns/ can’t tell themselves from verbs"
("Horse, Meadow, Horse").
— Leslie Adrienne Miller