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Today's poem is "Family Portrait"
from Now You’re the Enemy

The University of Arkansas Press

James Allen Hall is assistant professor of English at Bethany College in West Virginia. Now You’re the Enemy was a finalist for the Walt Whitman Book Award and a semifinalist for the Crab Orchard/Open Competition Book Award. He's the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize and three Pushcart Prize nominations.

Books by James Allen Hall: Now You're the Enemy

James Allen Hall's Blog.

About Now You’re the Enemy:

"From the 'unspeakable cliffs' that govern the landscape of damage (both physical and psychological) and of a belief in a life past that-a belief in rescue-James Allen Hall has looked into those spaces ‘where love is / only love if it makes you bleed.’ And from what he has found there, he has crafted these riveting poems, by turns searing and forgiving, iconoclastic and-unexpectedly, as if in spite of themselves-sacred. Now You're the Enemy is a stirring, triumphant debut."
—Carl Phillips

"James Hall is possessed by the family romance, in particular the figure of a difficult mother who looms on his imaginative stage. ‘I was,’ he writes, ‘mothered into art.’ And then some: Hall’s poems are psychically charged, nervy, both measured and fevered, compassionate and outrageous, and alive to the very core."
—Mark Doty

"Now You’re the Enemy is a brilliant exploration of the structure of feeling. This debut collection, in an astonishing sleight of hand, inflates representation in order to deflate the inner screen that provides both the darkness and the monsters."
—Claudia Rankine



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