Poor-Mouth Jubilee

About the Author

Michael Chitwood has worked on a construction crew, in a textile mill, and for a highway department; he is also the author of seven volumes of poetry and two books of essays. Having graduated from the only high school in rural Franklin County, Virginia, he earned a BA in English at Emory & Henry College and went on to work for the University of Virginia Medical Center as a science writer and editor for Helix magazine, meanwhile earning an MFA. For a number of years, he was a science writer and editor at Duke University Medical Center and Research Triangle Institute; he is now a professor at the University of North Carolina — Chapel Hill.

Advanced Praise

“No book about happiness has made me half as happy as I was made by Poor-Mouth Jubilee, Michael Chitwood’s sublime book about sorrow. Chitwood gives sorrow all its due respect — and no more, so the book is often laugh-out funny in its wisdom. Don’t pray for the sick, Chitwood instructs, ‘They have their own problems.’ And Poor-Mouth Jubilee pulses with the exhilaration of being alive.” — Andrew Hudgins

“Chitwood seems to be a Buddhist interested in comparative religion, who hails from Appalachia, or he’s a motorcycle-riding philosopher taking dictation from nature, writing its gospel with his trusty crow-quill pen. Facing both personal histories and the fates of nations, Chitwood proves that wit and ongoing exploration of the possibilities of prayer make excellent bedfellows. These poems have at their heart a luminous and generous emotional lucidity.” — Amy Gerstler

“At a time when ‘religion’ is too often misrepresented by literalists and scorekeepers, all through Poor-Mouth Jubilee we’re reminded that genuine belief (and doubt) resists the sound bite. The moment we try to articulate a thing as ineffable as faith, we’re reduced to formality, and too often to formula. This brilliant poet resists such facile — and anti-Scriptural — recourses, paradoxically noting the poverty of his own expression, which for this reader is a richness rare in current poetry.” — Sydney Lea

“In Poor-Mouth Jubilee, Michael Chitwood restores the make-it-new excitement of the first Imagists. Clean, clear, precise, and moving, his poems are free of rhetorical excess and posturing. His concerns are the natural world, family, friendship, health, and the gift and loss of these. Call it the Muse, call it Holy: the Spirit that endows this poetry is evidence of inspiration.” — Mark Jarman

“Michael Chitwood is a poet who is deeply rooted in the things of this earth: trees and flowers, birds and animals, other people’s overheard conversations and stories, and the huge variety of objects surrounding us in daily life. At the same time, he is also a profoundly religious poet. This makes him able to write poems that contemplate our mortality, as so many of the verses in this volume do, with great delicacy, precision, and empathy.” — Wendy Lesser

“Five or six times in the volume, we encounter the word ‘understory,’ that thick bushy place from which deer, wrens, and cardinals appear to the attentive speaker like signs of answered prayer. One of the delights of Chitwood’s work is its rich imagistic fidelity to the natural world of North Carolina with its joe-pye and jimson weeds, where crows ‘sail to the ground and walk like priests in their cassocks.’” — Peter Makuck, The Hudson Review

Format: paperback
ISBN: 978-1-932195-89-7