David Bottoms

David Bottoms Poems

David Bottoms Biography

David Bottoms (born 1949, Canton, Georgia) is an American poet. Bottoms' first book, Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump, was selected by Robert Penn Warren as winner of the 1979 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. His poems have appeared in magazines such as The Southern Review, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper's, The Paris Review, and Poetry, as well as in over four dozen anthologies and textbooks. He is the author of seven other books of poetry, In a U-Haul North of Damascus, Under the Vulture-Tree, Armored Hearts: Selected and New Poems, Vagrant Grace, Oglethorpe's Dream, Waltzing Through the Endtime, and We Almost Disappear as well as two novels, Any Cold Jordan and Easter Weekend. Among his awards are the Levinson and the Frederick Bock prizes from Poetry Magazine, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Bottoms has given over 200 readings in colleges and universities across the United States, as well as the Guggenheim Museum, The Library of Congress, and The American Academy in Rome. He has been interviewed on several regional and national radio and television programs, including two interviews on National Public Radio, and he is featured in a half-hour segment of The Southern Voice, a five-part television miniseries profiling Southern writers. Essays on and reviews of his work have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Southern Living, The Southern Review, Poetry, The Observer (London), and dozens of other newspapers and literary journals. Profiles appear in a number of resource books, including The Dictionary of Literary Biography, Contemporary Literary Criticism, and The Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry. In 2006, Bottoms was honored as a Star of the South by Irish America magazine. Bottoms received his B.A. from Mercer University and his Ph.D. from Florida State University. He has been a Richard Hugo Poet-in-Residence at the University of Montana and currently holds the John B. and Elena Diaz-Amos Distinguished Chair in English Letters at Georgia State University in Atlanta, where he edits Five Points: A Journal of Art and Literature and teaches creative writing. He was Poet Laureate of Georgia 2000-12.)

The Best Poem Of David Bottoms

Shooting Rats At The Bibb County Dump

Loaded on beer and whiskey, we ride
to the dump in carloads
to turn our headlights across the wasted field,
freeze the startled eyes of rats against mounds of rubbish.

Shot in the head, they jump only once, lie still
like dead beer cans.
Shot in the gut or rump, they writhe and try to burrow
into garbage, hide in old truck tires,
rusty oil drums, cardboard boxes scattered across the mounds,
or else drag themselves on forelegs across our beams of light
toward the darkness at the edge of the dump.

It's the light they believe kills.
We drink and load again, let them crawl
for all they're worth into the darkness we're headed for.

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