Adam Vines is assistant professor of English at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and editor of the Birmingham Poetry Review. His poems have been published in Poetry, North American Review, The Cincinnati Review, and The Greensboro Review.

Books by Adam Vines:

Other poems on the web by Adam Vines:
"Spring in Abernathy Coal Camp"
"On the Hook"
"The Cleaving"
Four poems
"Spring in Abernathy Coal Camp"
Four poems
"Spring in Abernathy Coal Camp"
Four poems

About The Coal Life:

"Adam Vines’s command of the sounds of the English language is delicious, but it never prettifies what he sees in the world. These are poems of real life and of the physical condition of being alive in all its joy and difficulty. A hardscrabble childhood, a self-demanding adulthood, both emerge in poems full of fine ironies and a mature acceptance."
—Mary Jo Salter

"Arguably the finest metaphor in The Coal Life is found in a dynamite box: a mine rat’s nest of ‘chewed scripture and company scrip.’ But in every poem, Adam Vines balances a tension perfect as it is uneasy—between life’s ‘urge for change, flight, and sex’ and the more patient resolve of faith in a world beyond ‘the mutable zodiac’ of this hard-wrought human universe. Perhaps these poems were conceived in the ‘shadow myth of ruins,’ but they emerge as the best poems do—‘leaning to the light.’ The Coal Life is remarkable—and necessary."
—Claudia Emerson

"Adam Vines’s The Coal Life is a book mined from linguistic, literary, and historical underworlds. These poems keenly observe and deeply ponder; they dig into the mineral dark of memory, uncovering along the way forgotten and abandoned voices, idioms, occupations, thwarted desires, moments of grace in misery, and accidents of astounding beauty. An extraordinary first collection, The Coal Life is built to last even while it rests upon ‘the shadow myth of ruins.’"
—Alan Shapiro