The Alabama Writers’ Forum
The Alabama Writers’ Forum, a partnership program of the Alabama State Council on the Arts, works to cultivate our state’s literary culture. We do that through supporting writers at all stages. We encourage our young writers to find their creative voice through the Father Goose Poetry Festival for Kids!–and through our Alabama High School Literary Arts Awards. We support the work of our state’s literary community through our Alabama Authors Directory, First Draft magazine, and other programming and opportunities for writers across the state. And we celebrate our state’s rich literary legacy through the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame. We are, above all, a community of writers united by our desire to advance the literary arts in Alabama. If that describes you — join us! There are many ways to get involved.
D.O.A. at Dante’s
D.O.A. at Dante’s By Robert Collins 11thour Press, 2023 Paper: $16.00 Genre: Poetry Reviewed by Richard Hague Robert Collins is co-founder of The Birmingham Poetry Review and author of several previous volumes of accomplished and varied poems. His latest collection, D.O.A. at Dante’s, is set in a college-town bar haunted by the lost souls of wasted adjuncts and professors, graduate students, hippies, slumming sorority girls, drop-outs, and various ne-er-do-wells and hangers-on of the kind Dante might have encountered in his Inferno, of which this place is an avatar. Its speaker, our guide, is a former denizen of that bar and city and university in another life. His cycle of poems is an extended complaint, confession, wry celebration, rebuttal, and finally, one suspects, exorcism of the demons of this pandemonium. It’s as if Chaucer’s “Prologue” has been displaced to Eliot’s Waste Land via Dante’s Inferno— “so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many.” Ten thousand cars a day, a few more or less perhaps, plus passersby on foot didn’t know and didn’t really give [...]
