Grounded in technical mastery, the poems in Out of Speech address issues both universal and timely. In this series of ekphrastic works, Adam Vines explores themes as varied as exile, family, disease, desire, and isolation through an array of twentieth- and twenty-first century painters, including Picasso, Hopper, Rothko, de Kooning, Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Artschwager. He also goes within and beyond these works of art to explore characters set in the present-day museums, from a bored docent to a misinformed “explainer” of an artwork’s meaning. Combining these two views―one that looks at the painting and another that looks around it―his poems affirm the artist’s insights into the complexity of being human.

Out of Speech: Poems (Sea Cliff Fund)

Literature & Fiction

Vines, Adam

Poetry

LSU Press

Written almost exclusively in traditional, modified, and nonce forms, the poems in Lures renegotiate grief, trauma, southern masculinities, and fatherhood with unflinching resolve. This new collection by Adam Vines draws much of its subject matter and imagery from fishing, revealing how close observations of species, spawning cycles, predation and feeding patterns, underwater topographies, water clarity, and lure choice reflect larger themes of what it means to be lured through memories of those who have passed and those who remain present. With Lures, Vines proposes that by reconstructing the stories from our past, we gain a greater understanding of our cultural identities and inheritances from those who made an impact on our lives.

Lures: Poems

Poetry. Collaboration. "This collaboration is a triumph. The language is so sharp and the description so precise, each poem unveils images that leave you with a kind of synesthesia. One sense stirs another until the world of the book becomes your own. You see things you didn't know you've been wanting and waiting to see: Spanish Moss lashing dragonflies, an afternoon's impersonal reverie. You cannot rest, nor should you. As you read these poems reverberating at every turn, you wish there was more of you to absorb every chord they strike. ACCORDING TO DISCRETION is electrifying."—Erica Dawson, author of The Small Blades Hurt "The poems in ACCORDING TO DISCRETION wander the world and send back reports full of marvelous observations. We are treated to a statue of the Madonna and her child being sniffed by a curious dog in Spain, coffins being hammered shut in Normandy, lids flying off trash cans in homage to the jazz musician Charles Mingus in Greenwich, money being burned to pay tribute to a dead relative in Taiwan, and peat smoke drifting over junipers shellacked by sleet in Ireland. In a poem about America's Bicentennial, several people sit on top of cars 'waiting for something miraculous' to happen. Readers of ACCORDING TO DISCRETION don't have to wait; poem after poem deliver accounts of the miraculous in everyday events. This collection, which often draws inspiration from jazz musicians, abstract expressionist painters, and other writers, is full of surprises that will delight readers for years to come."—Henry Hart, author of Background Radiation "Allen Jih and Adam Vines' ACCORDING TO DISCRETION is a series of relay races, each poet adding a burst of speed as the baton is passed on and then passed back with dizzying panache. But it's also an energetic anatomy of middle-class American life with a realist's reluctant appreciation of the surreality that surrounds us: 'You wish it all to be a simple hallucination.' Meanwhile nature serenely goes about its business of unknowningly chastising human artifice. ACCORDING TO DISCRETION is vibrant and enthralling poetry."—Andrew Hudgins, author of A Clown at Midnight

According to Discretion

Jih, Allen

Unicorn Press (NC)

Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize Finalist

The Coal Life: Poems

University of Arkansas Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Vines, Adam. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Vines, Adam

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Vines, Adam. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Out of Speech: Poems (Sea Cliff Fund)

Lures: Poems

According to Discretion

The Coal Life: Poems