Armored Hearts, combining new poems and a selection from previous volumes, offers the power of idiomatic narrative at its naked best. "It is refreshing to read

"An exquisite storyteller."—The Southern Review "David Bottoms's poems just get better and better."—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution "One finds here what on

Robert Penn Warren, in a recent introduction given at the Library of Congress, wrote that in the work of David Bottoms "we find a strong and original new poet.

Bottoms has a breathtaking ability to capture human tenderness, vulnerability, and cruelty in a single line. His poems, set primarily in the American South, wit