Description: Jesse Graves was born and raised in Sharps Chapel, Tennessee, where his ancestors settled in the 1780s. His poems and essays have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Southern Quarterly, Connecticut Review, and other journals, anthologies, and collections. He teaches at East Tennessee State University, where he is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Literature and Language.
"I admire the assurance, the formal authority of Graves' craft."--Robert Morgan "Here is a welcome new voice offering strengths in craftsmanship and music, but always grounded in a profound sense of place. Read these poems for their wisdom, listen closely to their cadence, let them take you where they will."
--Jeff Daniel Marion "Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine is more than an extraordinary first book. These poems have the music, wisdom, and singular voice of a talent fully realized, and make abundantly clear that Jesse Graves is one of America's finest young poets."
--Ron Rash
Review Quotes: "Jesse Graves is a Tennessee state treasure, and his Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine is an important and beautiful American literary landmark. Indeed, I know of no poet of my generation more attuned to or instructive of a place than Graves. His companionable, melodic, exquisitely physical and moving poems offer help to those of us who mourn our own places and lives there as they were, while offering a graceful and wise example of how to go on loving those places and lives as they have become. If you would unlearn the seeming contradiction between grief and grateful awareness, travel these pages, saying goodbye on the road out to the old, rusted, Graves family hay rake as you go, 'goodbye to the five / leaning wheels, their crooked tines turning, reaching up / like broken fingers to wave hello, hello, goodbye.'"
-Jonathan Johnson