Armored Hearts

David Bottoms

Armored Hearts, combining new poems with a selection from previous volumes, offers the power of idiomatic narrative at its naked best. David Bottoms presents dramatic stories in rich language falling in natural and captivating cadences; he brings us into the terrain of ruin and hope and beauty, reminding us again and again that it is our own temporal reality, not the real world, that is fragile.

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ISBN: 9781556590726

Format: Paperback

Chinese Dragons

What do we want to give each other as we park under the sign
of the Electric Dragon?
Mysterious, you say, a name
like some bizarre arrangement of stars, a tail
of fire crawling all the way from China.

And tonight, looking up through the windshield
of my truck, we know already
what they’ll be, no need to study the walls
of patterns, the yellow parrots
climbing stalks of cane, the rosebuds
unfolding under the paws
of red leopards, the erotic fish.

Hum of the needle, and that pale moment
of no turning back—
your eyes cut from mine
to the blue hand pointing toward the chair.

And when you sit in that chair, your blouse draped
on one shoulder, I know what claws out
of the sky and into your arm, what
will claw into my calf
and ankle, is something more than legend.

In your eyes as he needles the fire—
our desire for permanence and the permanence
of our desire.

About the Author

David Bottoms (1949—2023) was the author of several books. His first book, Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump, was chosen by Robert Penn Warren as winner of the 1979 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. His poems have appeared widely in magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Poetry, and The Paris Review, as well as in sixty anthologies and textbooks. He is the author of eight other books of poetry, two novels, and …

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Reviews

“It is refreshing to read a poet who is not obliquely vague, who tells a story cleanly and convincingly, and yet who will not close down mysterious and complicated things about life that simply defy such closure.” —Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Bottoms’s ability to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary can be seen in one wonderful work after another among the pages of these selected poems.” —Edward Byrne, Valparaiso Poetry Review

“[David Bottoms] has written deceptively accessible poems that become more complex, more mysterious, with each reading… Bottoms’ poems do what the best poems have always done: They compel us to reread them. They linger in our minds. They alter our perception of the world.” —Ron Rash, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“David Bottoms has what only a few poets of any generation possess: An individual tone, what musicians call ‘his own sound.’ One cannot read him without being nerve-touched by his sardonic yet compassionate countryman’s voice, his hunter’s irony.” —James Dickey

“David Bottoms… [makes] extraordinary poems of small things… Armored Hearts… should bring Bottoms to his rightful place at the forefront of the baby-boom [sic] generation of poets.” —David Breeden, Small Press