Steel Valley Elegy

On Night Moves in Ohio These narratives are by turns poignant, funny, and starkly realistic. They are the human stories of the mid-twentieth century industrial mid-west. The honest sentiments of these poems remind us how a centrality of setting, as much time as place, form our experience into themes. Every poem is engrossing, teeming with fascinating storyline detail and imagery. -William Hathaway, author of Dawn Chorus: New and Selected Poems In this remarkable collection, William Heath mourns and celebrates an almost vanished way of life: sometime brutal yet intensely human. A world that, tough as it is, is consistently shot through with its own wry, mordant humor. These poems are savvy and lively, as exact as a high jumper's focus, quick and accurate as a tennis player's eye, wrist, ankle. Night Moves in Ohio is Heath's own remembrance of things past-an autobiography in rapt miniature of his unforgotten early life, mercilessly but compassionately lit by the laser-light of memory. -Eamon Grennan, author of Out of Sight: New & Selected Poems On The Walking Man

William Heath is in my opinion one of the most brilliantly accomplished and gifted young poets to appear in the United States in quite some time. I am especially moved by the delicacy and precision of the language, which indicates a distinguished intelligence, and by the purity and depth of feeling in all of his poems. -James Wright, author of Above the River: The Complete Poems