In the vernacular of a world where logging trucks and car seats repurposed as front porch furniture are the stage setting for family drama, Nancy Dillingham's poems weave stories of seduction and betrayal. Her spare lines and her beautiful, plain language echo the voices of southern mountain-dwellers telling their stories of family, the power of instinct and love gone wrong. These poems carry us into an authentic and personal world, remarkable in its specificity. They shine in their fierce honesty and in their elegant simplicity. -Kathy Nelson, author of Cattails In terse, sharp images Nancy Dillingham captures the elemental moments of life: the joy, sorrow, and sometimes horror of human experience. In my favorite poem "Knowing" a young girl enters a room to find a bed "stripped to the thin / mattress and springs" and her mother's blood on the floor. The "terror and pain / on her father's face" capture the profundity of the miscarriage that has occurred, something the girl cannot completely grasp. Yet the father's practicality in ordering the girl to "get the wash pan / and clean up the mess" suggests a family tough enough to survive a life both frail and unpredictable.

More Frailer than Flowers sheds light on the world of such moments. -Julia Nunnally Duncan, author of An Endless Tapestry If a poet is going to name her book using a quote from one of America's finest lyricists-Bob Dylan-well, the poetry better be mighty good-and Nancy Dillingham's More Frailer than Flowers does not disappoint. Powerful verbs slash with scythes that shine and fog that eats the light and clouds that clabber the sky. The mystery of men-some who unspool from barstools and smooth-dance, preachers who do more than preach, lovers who leave-is juxtaposed with the stark strength of women who lift their skirts and buck dance, who bleed flowers, who smother ticking alarm clocks, and who shine their beauty like the inside of porcelain bowls. And, in the end, we ruminate that those might have been our memories, our loss, the poetry of our own pasts. But we do know this for sure: wherever Nancy Dillingham takes us-past the Bellflower apple trees, through the bees with their amber sound, or into the cold to rescue our Frizzy Lizzies-well, yes, we shall most assuredly savor, at the core, her perfect kernels of perfect poems. -Peg Steiner, writer and editor.