These poems explore the author's Southern Baptist upbringing and how that history echoes through her adult experiences of sexual love, self-knowledge, loss and motherhood. Her testament is that of a life, a family and a world.

This nationally acclaimed book tells the shocking true story of how photographs taken by an amateur photographer and mother became the center of a disturbing legal battle that galvanized a community and challenged the legal system charged with protecting, not harming, children.
When Cynthia Stewart dropped off eleven rolls of film at a drugstore near her home, it didn t occur to her that two snapshots of her eight-year-old daughter would cause the county prosecutor to arrest her, take her away in handcuffs, threaten to remove her child from her home, and charge her with crimes that...

Winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, selected by Robert Wrigley

Season of the Second Thought begins in a deep blue mood, longing to find words for what feels beyond saying. Lynn Powell's poems journey through the seasons, quarreling with the muse, reckoning with loss, questioning the heart and its "pedigree of Pentecost," and seeking out paintings in order to see inside the self. With their crisp observations and iridescent language, these poems accumulate the bounty of an examined life. These lines emerge from darkness into a shimmering equilibrium--witty, lush, and...