Highway or Belief

The violence of men, the delicacy of their broken bodies, the religiosity of the town that raised them: all of these influence Highway or Belief, which documents an America we rarely see. In J. Scott Brownlee's Llano, Aron Anderson is the king of baseball and meth. High school football heroes become PTSD-affected war vets. The rural dead sing from the hollow flutes their bones leave in the dust. These are poems whose language begins with the body and the land. For Brownlee, the two are inseparable. -Dorianne Laux, author of The Book of Men