Babylon in a Jar by Andrew Hudgins

Gary Soto recommends
Babylon in a Jar, poems by Andrew Hudgins: "Hudgins can't get over his Southern childhood, which he drags as lovely narrative poems into his adulthood in Cincinnati. Perhaps the South does have manners, as Flannery O'Connor once said, but Hudgins's characters, mostly men, have such inconsistent manners: one moment they are brutes with their pale beer, and, in the next, tenderhearts sitting among begonias and impatiens. Where are we going to find a better book of poems this year?" (Houghton Mifflin)