Unfinished Murder Ballads

A new collection from award-winning Darren C. Demaree. A gorgeous foray into a dark mind. Accompanied by Ryan Barker's photographs, Midwest Nostalgia. This unsettling collection of snapshot motives and mysterious raptures will leave you feeling visited by more than brilliant lyricism. Unfinished Murder Ballads is Demaree at his finest, darkest, and most atmospheric. The book is accompanied by Ryan Barker's photographs of a ruined Mid-America from his collection, Midwest Nostalgia. Demaree is the author of eight poetry collections, most recently "Two Towns Over," which was selected as the Louise Bogan Award winner.

Like the lilac flowers flourishing over the (rumored) horse burial ground, Unfinished Murder Ballads grow beautifully even when "it feels monstrous." With warmth and humor, Darren Demaree shows us an array of characters living and dying in their ordinary lives. Each vignette wrestles with the narrative angel that human violence and tenderness are a matter of combined scale and spectrum. Demaree is a writer who can find, like a foot through an iced lake, "the one weakness in miles of strength." This collection glitters with brief light; that light is language and how it holds us.

- Hannah VanderHart, author of "What Pecan Light"

In "Unfinished Murder Ballads," Darren C. Demaree takes moments and snapshots of moments and fractures of moments and creates entire worlds with them. There are universes on each page; there are longing souls and stalled hearts and mournful cries. There is pain and suffering and love. And there is, always, always, beauty.

- Cathy Ulrich, author, "Ghosts of You".