Flying South on the Back of a Dove

In Flying South on the Back of a Dove, Kelly Rowe writes of loss: loss of life, of innocence, of love. She explores how our losses weigh on us, and how we shoulder and carry them through our lives. These poems are also about return: to a South that is the landscape of childhood, an Eden that exists only in memory and in dreams.

Describing an arc from childhood to middle age, the poems confront the brutality of everyday existence, from suicide to domestic violence to murder, but also celebrate how we reach for hope, so elusive and so necessary.

The Traveling Salesman’s Wife
On Mondays you drive off to your other life;
I lie in bed and wonder if you have another wife,
in Pearson, or Baxley, or Florida somewhere,
waiting up as I do, Wednesday and Friday nights …