Cities of Flesh and the Dead

Book excerpt: Poetry. CITIES OF FLESH AND THE DEAD is the eagerly awaited third collection of poetry by Diann Blakely. It won the seventh annual Elixir Press Poetry Awards and the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America. Baron Wormser had this to say: "An imaginer who hits the bull's-eye with every detail, intonation, and emotional twitch, Blakely's fullness of language quietly and firmly dazzles as she moves among epochs, personae and geographies. She is a master of evoking the bounties of loss while embracing the wayward joys of what is unaccountably found." Her first two books are Hurricane Walk and Farewell My Lovelies. Her work has appeared in such publications as Denver Quarerly, Colorado Review, American Literary Review, Shenandoah, and Green Mountains Review. She lives in Georgia.