David Bottoms's career has been marked by a series of critical successes. His first full-length book of poetry, Shooting Rats At the Bibb County Dump (1980), was chosen by Robert Penn Warren as the winner of the 1979 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. Bottoms has twice received the Book of the Year in Poetry Award from the Dixie Council of Authors and Journalists, first in 1983 for his second major collection, In a U-Haul North of Damascus, and then again in 1988 for his 1987 book Under the Vulture Tree. In 1985 a group of poems from Under the Vulture-Tree was awarded the Levinson Prize from Poetry magazine. In 1988 Bottoms received several honors: an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, an Ingram-Merrill Award, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Over one hundred of his poems have appeared in magazines...