This is an anthology of irreverence and humor in the hands of our best poets. Can serious poetry be funny? Chaucer and Shakespeare would say yes, and so do the authors of these 187 poems that address timeless concerns but that also include comic elements. Beginning with the Beats and the New York School and continuing with both marquee-name poets and newcomers, ""Seriously Funny"" ranges from poems that are capsized by their own tomfoolery to those that glow with quiet wit to ones in which a laugh erupts in the midst of terrible darkness. Most of the selections were made in the editors' battered compact car, otherwise known as the Seriously Funny Mobile Unit. During the two years in which Barbara Hamby and David Kirby made their choices, they'd set out with a couple of boxes of books in the back seat, and whoever wasn't driving read to the other. When they found that a poem made both of them think but laugh as well, they earmarked it. Readers will find a true generosity in these poems, an eagerness to share ideas and emotions and also to entertain. The singer Ali Farka Toure said that honey is never good when it's only in one mouth, and the editors of ""Seriously Funny"" hope its readers find much to share with others.

"An exquisite storyteller."--"The Southern Review"

"David Bottoms's poems just get better and better."--"The Atlanta Journal-Constitution"

"One finds here what one expects in a book of good Southern poems: clear narratives . . . evocative images, searching irony, and meditative poise." --"Library Journal"

Rooted in the customs of Southern families and peopled with undertakers, bluegrass musicians, daughters practicing karate, and elderly parents, David Bottoms' poems are generous, insightful, and lean headlong into familial wisdom. Past and present interweave with grandmothers spitting tobacco juice, ponds "filled with construction runoff," and the boyhood home-site paved over for a KFC. This is Bottoms' most personal and heartbreaking book.

From "My Daughter Works the Heavy Bag":

"A bow to the instructor,
then fighting stance, and the only girl in karate class faces the heavy bag.
Small for fifth grade--willow-like, says her mother--
sweaty hair tangled like blown willow branches.
The boys try to ignore her. They fidget against the wall, smirk,
practice their routine of huff and feint.
Circle, barks the instructor,
jab, circle, kick, and the black bag wobbles on its chain.
Again and again, the bony jewels of her fist
jab out in glistening precision,
her flawless legs remember arabesque and glissade.
Kick, jab, kick, and the bag coughs rhythmically from its gut.
The boys fidget and wait . . . "

David Bottom, Georgia's Poet Laureate, was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2009. He teaches at Georgia State University and co-edits "Five Points "magazine. He lives in Marietta, Georgia.

A Scrap in the Blessings Jar, a volume of new and selected poems by David Bottoms, captures the evolution of the poet's spiritual quest over the past fifty years. A native and longtime resident of Georgia, Bottoms draws inspiration from the American South, and his work examines themes related to family dynamics, the woods, animals, fishing, and music in an effort to, as he once told an interviewer, "reveal something about the hidden things of the world, the vague or shadowy relationships and connections that exist just below the surface of our daily lives." This book charts his progression from tightly wrought naturalistic narratives to works that reflect his shifting conception of the interplay between memory, the present, and the metaphysical. At heart, Bottoms remains a storyteller who employs figurative language to discover the extraordinary in the seemingly mundane, and whose poetry explores the depths of our existential condition and common humanity.

"Armored Hearts" offers the power of idiomatic narrative at its naked best. David Bottoms joins a generous collection of new poems with those selected from four previous volumes published to critical and popular acclaim, locating a mythic dimension within common experience. He presents dramatic stories in rich language falling in natural and captivating cadences until we are caught up in his world, forced finally to look into our own innermost nature. Naming Bottoms the winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets in 1979, Robert Penn Warren noted, "In his vision the actual world is not transformed, but illumnated." Bottoms 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.

David Bottoms has a breathtaking ability to capture human tenderness, vulnerability, and cruelty in the brief turn of a line. Grounded in the contemporary South, his poems often witness people in their moments of failure, as their fantasies and families collapse around them, as they weep at gravesides, as they recognize their own fading image in the bathroom mirror.

"One cannot read Bottoms without being nerve-touched by his sardonic yet compassionate country-man's voice, his hunter's irony."- James Dickey

David Bottoms' 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 Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper's, Poetry," and "The Paris Review," as well as in numerous anthologies. He is author of several books of poetry as well as two novels. Among his other awards are the Levinson Prize, an Ingram-Merrill Award, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. An avid guitarist and fisherman, he divides his time between Georgia and Montana.

In these 14 poems, David Bottoms waltzes through the "Christ-haunted South" and highlights how and where the afterlife intersects our daily lives. In a strong and musical voice, Bottoms, the poet laureate of Georgia, modernizes the narrative traditions of the American South. He encounters the ghosts of musicians and recounts strange instances of religious visitation:

From "Vigilance":

"Like my neighbor again who grew a yellow rose
wilted with the sign of the cross, or his sister in Biloxi
who once saw the virgin swimming
in a bowl of vegetable soup.
Accolades, yes, to Ramona Barreras
of Phoenix, Arizona, who pulled from her oven
in 1977
a tortilla scorched with the face of Christ,
which may or may not
have been the face that appeared
some ten years later in Bras D'Or
on an outside wall of a Tim Horton's Restaurant,
though both made the papers
and drew their share of pilgrims."

"What does it mean," Bottoms asks, "that God keeps stamping his image on pastry and French toast, on biscuits lightly burned around the edges?" At the core of this book is a seeker, a person trying to make sense out of an unintelligible world, confronting the darkest dimensions of human nature, and writing a gorgeous, meta-physically charged poetry.

David Bottoms, the Poet Laureate of Georgia, teaches at Georgia State University in Atlanta. He is the author of four books of poems and founding editor of "Five Points" magazine. His work has been featured on National Public Radio and on "The Southern Voice," a television series profiling Southern writers.

This valuable little book is a collection of six essays by and four interviews with Georgia Poet Laureate David Bottoms. Edward Hirsch, author of The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems, says, "This deeply considered little book-offhandedly personal, keenly thoughtful-treats poetry with the seriousness it deserves as 'the most natural vehicle of the spirit,' a quest for the divine." Dave Smith, author of Little Boats, Unsalvaged: Poems 1992-2004, says, "Bottoms writes something more like meditation than criticism and his book will pleasure long and well the most discriminating as well as the amateur reader."

A panoramic view of the state in words and images; Oglethorpe's Dream unites the award-winning photography of Diane Kirkland with the beautifully powerful writing of David Bottoms, Georgia's poet laureate. The result is a stunning portrait of the lands, waters, culture, and people of Georgia. From the sea islands to the cities, from the wiregrass to the mountain forests, Kirkland gives us a gallery of spectacular images showcasing the state in its breadth, beauty, and diversity. Marrying landscape to history, Bottoms gives voice to a people filled with courage, pain, conviction, and, above all, hope. Together they capture the natural beauty of the diverse landscape, the richness of the state's storied past, and the essence of its spirited people. ""Isn't that what you always hoped for,"" Bottoms writes, ""to find a place...and yourself in that place?"" Oglethorpe's Dream helps us all to see a place called Georgia, and there to find something of ourselves.