Read an excerpt: “Daring Love”

Praise for The Daughterliest Son

“I am daring love to be anything else,” A. Loudermilk writes, “to be on its best behavior wicked, to be heartache/in its prime.” Daring’s exactly the word; these fearless and live-wire poems portray Southern culture — and the prism and prison of gender — with candor, rage, and an eye for telling detail so exact it verges on tenderness. And Loudermilk gives us a world of context; here are Nina Simone, Hubert Selby, Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra drag; evidence, all of them, of the strangeness and fury of love.

— Mark Doty

About A. Loudermilk

A. Loudermilk grew up in southern Illinois. His poems, non-fiction, and cultural criticism have appeared in Tin House, The Mississippi Review, The Madison Review (as winner of the Phyllis Smart Young Prize in Poetry), The Redneck Review, River Teeth, Journal X, the anthology Car Crash Culture (Palgrave, 2001), and elsewhere. He teaches composition and creative writing at Indiana University, Bloomington.