Ohio Violence

Book excerpt: Winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, 2008. Ohio Violence starts with scandal: the narrator leads the high school football coach into the cornfields, but as she promises, "nothing happened." In the fields, in the woods, in the dark water of Ohio, something is happening. Girls disappear, turn on each other. Men watch from the rearview as the narrator hedges, changes her mind, then shows all in this break-out collection of bittersweet and cataclysmic lyrics. "Alison Stine writes, 'Believe me.' I am telling you a story, ' and the story she tells us we believe as it unfolds. The poems are moving--beautiful, tragic, death-haunted, and uncanny--like old folk songs and murder ballads--lovely on the tongue, heavy on the heart. As a narrator, Stine does not and will not swerve when faced with the brutal, the adamantine and the ordinary damage that equals a life."--Eric Pankey, judge and author of Reliquaries ALISON STINE is a 2008 winner of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship. She was born in Indiana and grew up in Ohio. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she is the author of the chapbook Lot of My Sister, winner of the Wick Prize. Her poems have appeared in such journals as The Paris Review, Poetry, and The Kenyon Review. This is her first book. She lives in Athens, Ohio.