Studied Days - Poems Early & Late in Appalachia - Tapa blanda

Poetry. "STUDIED DAYS sings with strange and sensual enchantment, calling the reader into that other time, that other 'halfway place of slopes' where human longing assumes memory's abiding shapes. Know the well with its 'single eye of moonlight shimmer[ing] at the bottom, forty lean years deep.' Study the woman in the night, naked and sleeping upon creek stone, only one dream away from betrayal—and consider, too, how the bearded, bloodied, drunken man stumbles through 'frog-slicked ditches' toward experience's ripening truth. The Appalachian Ohio landscapes of Hague's early manhood hold the lonely language of birds, insects, dark waters—it is here where the dead must rise to assume 'the holy duties of their flesh' and where the living keep 'going down' to make sense of the shadowy places beyond home. Exuberance and grief entwine in this stunning narrative collection." —Sherry Cook Stanforth

Richard Hague is a native Appalachian, born in Steubenville, Ohio, just across the river from Weirton, West Virginia. He is Writer-in-Residence at Thomas More College. He has conducted workshops, lectures and readings all over the Midwest and Appalachia. Winner of four Ohio Arts Council fellowships in poetry and creative nonfiction, he is a member of the Academy of American Poets, the Appalachian Studies Association, the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative, The Mercantile Library, The Literary Club of Cincinnati, and the Irish Heritage Center of Cincinnati. His Milltown Natural: Essays and Stories from a Life (Bottom Dog Press) was a National Book Award nominee. For Ripening (Ohio State University Press) he was named co-Poet of the Year in Ohio in l985. Alive In Hard Country (Bottom Dog Press) was named Poetry Book of the Year by the Appalachian Writers Association, and DURING THE RECENT EXTINCTIONS: NEW & SELECTED POEMS 1984-2012 (Dos Madres Press, 2012) won the Weatherford Award in Poetry. STUDIED DAYS - POEMS EARLY & LATE IN APPALACHIA (Dos Madres Press, 2017) is his latest collection since BEASTS, RIVER, DRUNK MEN, GARDEN, BURST, & LIGHT: SEQUENCES AND LONG POEMS (Dos Madres Press, 2016). He has also edited two anthologies, Quarried: Three Decades of Pine Mt. Sand & Gravel, Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative (2015) and REALMS OF THE MOTHERS: THE FIRST DECADE OF DOS MADRES PRESS (Dos Madres Press, 2016) He continues to live in Cincinnati, and to operate Erie Gardens, a small urban organic farm.