Flying South on the Back of a Dove

In Flying South on the Back of a Dove, Kelly Rowe writes of loss: loss of life, of innocence, of love. She explores how our losses weigh on us, and how we shoulder and carry them through our lives. These poems are also about return: to a South that is the landscape of childhood, an Eden that exists only in memory and in dreams.Describing an arc from childhood to middle age, the poems confront the brutality of everyday existence, from suicide to domestic violence to murder, but also celebrate how we reach for hope, so elusive and so necessary.The Traveling Salesman's Wife On Mondays you drive off to your other life; I lie in bed and wonder if you have another wife, in Pearson, or Baxley, or Florida somewhere, waiting up as I do, Wednesday and Friday nights . . .

"Keenly seen, wondrously precise, achingly humane, Kelly Rowe's poems soar, whether she is celebrating a lost father, singing of a southern childhood of gravity and grace, probing the intimate risks of love, or evoking the pained choices of those alive at society's margins. Every poem in Flying South on the Back of a Dove is held aloft by the poet's generous and sustaining eye, ear, and heart, as she offers us 'provisions of grief, ' asks us to find hope in the 'red flash rising, a burst/in the black expanse, ' and encourages us 'to embrace the earth.'"--David Groff, author of Clay, "These graceful, accomplished poems lay claim to a specific terrain--to dailyness as it inhabits the present and the past, whether a wagon train in history or a bedside table with today's items on it. The language here is often daring, the syntax ambitious in its reach and the tone exact and exacting. These are poems to read and remember."--Eavan Boland

Kelly Rowe was born in North Carolina, and lived for many years in the American South. She received her MFA degree in English from the University of Iowa, and her JD from Emory University, in Atlanta, Georgia. She now lives, writes and occasionally practices law in Flagstaff, Arizona. Her poems have appeared in journals including the Iowa Review, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the North American Review, and most recently, the Southern Poetry Review and the Pittsburgh Poetry Review.