American Rendering showcases twenty-four new poems as well as a generous selection from Andrew Hudgins’s seven previous volumes, spanning a distinguished career of more than twenty-five
years.
Hudgins, who was born in Texas and spent most of his childhood in the South, is a lively and prolific poet who draws on his vivid Southern and, more specifically, Southern Baptist,
childhood. Although he was influenced by writers such as John Crowe Ransom, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and James Dickey, Hudgins has developed a distinctively descriptive form of
the Southern Gothic imagination. His poems are rich with religious allusions, irreverent humor, and at times are inflected with a dark and violent eroticism. Of his most recent collection,
Ecstatic in the Poison, Mark Strand wrote: “[It] is full of intelligence, vitality, and grace. And there is a beautiful oddness about it. Dark moments seem charged with an eerie luminosity
and the most humdrum events assume a startling lyric intensity. A deep resonant humor is everywhere, and everywhere amazing.”
