There's a precision to the language and storytelling in Evans Lansing Smith's haunting and provocative "mystery in verse" Middleburg that I deeply admire. Told in skillfully constructed Sapphic stanzas, these tales draw us with immediacy into the observed historical world of a family in crisis-most significantly, the poet's suicidal mother and demise of matriarchs before her. Against a fraught but lively pastoral of genteel Middleburg, Virginia, Smith mourns, reanimates, and mythologizes by hoisting into stark view harrowing events from his past-recollected, at once, in the mind of the mature man, and innocent eyes of the young son who witnessed and survived it.

Michelle Bitting

winner of the DeNovo, Sacramento Poetry Center, Catamaran, and Wilder

book prizes, including Nightmares & Miracles, forthcoming, 2022

"A powerful testimony to how finely tuned poetry can

contain trauma and celebrate life's ongoing mysteries."

Christine Downing