ABOUT THIS BOOK

Elizabeth Hadaway doesn’t just tell stories in her poems, she aims to delight as much as instruct, and her poems are scores for performance. Sparkling with shout-outs to Beowulf and Keats, varied meters, and surprising rhymes, she lifts centuries of hurt and anger into a contrary music. Her reach is vast, including everything from T. S. Eliot to the swans on her vinyl lace shower curtains. She warns us off from stereotypes and misconceptions about Appalachia and the South. Here are short lyrics and long narratives, poems about ballads, baton twirling, hound dogs, Shelley, and NASCAR stars. In “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Car, of Dale Earnhardt at Daytona,” she writes about a memorial T-shirt, “his face folded, half / in love with asphalt death.” Fire Baton announces the debut of a talented new poet of wit, vivacity, and color. And no matter how far she roams, she never lets us forget her roots, that she comes from a place “where where’s whirr.”

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Elizabeth Leigh Palmer Hadaway lives in Kingsvill, Maryland. She was an instructor at Virginia Commonwealth University and worked as an historical interpreter at Agecroft Hall in Richmond, Virginia. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and has received scholarships to the Breadloaf and Sewanee writer’s conferences.

REVIEWS

“Fire Baton is an immense achievement. Here is wit acid and sweet, angry and gentle, tonic and forgiving. Every line shines with the excellence of poetic craft. . . . Hadaway’s satire is deceptive in its strength. If you think you feel a pinprick, better look again. It may be a bullet hole.” —Fred Chappell, author of Backsass: Poems “Elizabeth Hadaway’s Fire Baton is formally elegant, yet effortlessly sassy and vernacular at the same time. In poem after poem, she proves herself place-proud without a trace of the provincial, and she’s exactly what a poet should be—smart and passionate.” —Gregory Orr, author of Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents
Was You Born Here?	000
All Short-a Appalachia	000
The Black Dog of the Blue Ridge	000
A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Car, of Dale Earnhardt at Daytona	000
Living with Ballads: Sidna Allen	000
The Hundredth Summer of the Chestnut Blight	000
Ghosts for Dinner	000
American Viscose Plant, 1929	000
Clampdown	000
Tiffanie	000
Drinking Bottled Water	000
Faculty Parking Apocalypse	000
The Shower Curtain Swans	000
Disney Ride Song of the South	000
Moved, Lost Your Number	000
Fearing the Loss of My Hounds	000
Crop Cults	000
Living with Ballads: The Nutshell Bed	000
Fire Baton	000
The Crocodile Dream, Every Seven Years	000
Magic City Mortgage Co., 1951	000
Idol Meat	000
The Consolation of Philosophy	000
Pets, Ending with My Folks' First Dog	000
Barry on Porch, Barry in Parking Lot	000
A Scratch	000
An Essay in Criticism	000
Surf with P. B. Shelley	000
Amazed at Gray Light	000
A Good Half Hand	000
The Banks of Hell	000
Fancy Gap	000
Beating My Head on a Curb in California	000
Silicon Valley, 1998	000
The Confirmation Gift of a Cat's Eye Headlight	000
Duchess	000
Beginning with a Line by John Berryman	000
Locket Icon	000
Richmond Breastworks	000
Montani Semper Liberi	000
Praise	000
Lumber Room	000
Public Transportation	000
Living with the Bureau of Public Debt	000
Notes	000

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