Description: "In Heaven's Burning Porch, James Dunlap reckons with the legacy left to him: one of pain, gratitude, violence, and salvation. In turns dark, humorous; lyric and narrative, Heaven's Burning Porch explores what it means to grow up in rural Arkansas under the weight of his rough inheritance"--
Review Quotes: "If the human relationship to nature is casually brutal and blind to harmony, we should expect little from the relationships humans have with each other. These are the stakes of this haunting and powerful book of poetry, where fear and threat mingle with beauty and love. Add to this mixture the binding agent of religion, and the ingredients for a southern Gothic are in place. But that leaves the possibility of redemption, which if not fully delivered, at least fills the mind of the young protagonist with knowledge and naming, and the prospect of coming through. This book impresses with its careful detail and its unavoidable walk between shame and hope, anguish and affection. The poet offers a hair-curling read, but a sure hand behind the art, and the art, as one would hope, transforms the whole."
--Maurice Manning