Please introduce the book to our readers.

Next Door to the Dead (University Press of Kentucky 2015) is a book of poems that takes its inspiration from the fact I’ve lived with my family in an old country church, built before the Civil War, and “next door” to a little graveyard for over twenty years. When we first moved into the church and began turning it into our home, we were told that the graveyard was full—that there would be no new burials. And for sure most of the tombstones were old and crumbling, but after we had lived there a few months I came home from the grocery store to find a hearse in my driveway. I write about that experience in the poem “Living Next to the Dead Acre.” In the years that have followed, I’ve been in my laundry room, pulling towels out of the dryer and have looked up to see gravediggers at work in the cemetery. I never know when they might show up—which is a sort of metaphor, isn’t it? After all, life is temporary and we never know how long we will be given. Continue reading →