American Rendering showcases twenty-four new poems as well as a generous selection from Andrew Hudgins's six previous volumes, spanning a distinguished career of more than twenty-five years. Hudgins, who was born in Texas and spent most of his childhood in the South, is a lively and prolific poet who draws on his vivid Southern and, more specifically, Southern Baptist, childhood. Influenced by writers such as John Crow Ransom, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and James Dickey, Hudgins has developed a distinctively descriptive form of the Southern Gothic imagination.His poems are rich with religious allusions, irreverent humor, and at times are inflected with a dark and violent eroticism. Of Hudgins's most recent collection, Ecstatic in the Poison, Mark Strand wrote: '[It] is full of intelligence, vitality, and grace. And there is a beautiful oddness about it.Dark moments seem charged with an eerie luminosity and the most humdrum events assume a startling lyric intensity.A deep resonant humor is everywhere, and everywhere amazing.' AUTHOR: ANDREW HUDGINS is the author of seven books of poems, including Saints and Strangers, The Glass Hammer, and most recently Ecstatic in the Poison. A finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, he is a recipient of Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships as well as the Harper Lee Award. He currently teaches in the Department of English at Ohio State University.
