This book, which was selected by poet John Hodgen for the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry, ranges across rural Florida and Georgia as well as Los Angeles and New York City, include considerations of homesickness, memory, music, alcohol, love, and loss. With a voice at once inquisitive and prescient, Minor meditates on consumption, vice, homesickness, memory, family, and the landscape. Minor’s writing is unerringly lyric and blooming with elegant charm and keen description. This book is an alchemy of fortitude in the face of despair and all the transformative possibility that comes with the hope for a better future.
 

Laura Minor won the Rita Dove Poetry Award (chosen by Marilyn Nelson), the Sassaman Graduate Creative Writing Award, the International Literary Award, and the Emerging Writers Spotlight Award, chosen by poet D.A. Powell. She was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. She was named one of the "10 Acclaimed FSU English Professors That Will Inspire You" by collegemagazine.com. Her poetry is forthcoming or has most recently appeared in Ploughshares, North American Review, The Missouri Review, The Normal School, South Carolina Review, Quiddity International Literary Journal, Arc Poetry Magazine, and the 2021 New Rivers Press anthology, Wild Gods: The Ecstatic In Contemporary Poetry and Prose. She was a Teachers College Fellow at Columbia University and was chosen by Denise Duhamel for a Sarah Lawrence Poetry Award. She holds a PhD from Florida State University and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence. She currently lives near the Appalachian Trail.