Ed Madden’s third book of poetry, Nest, is a book about home—the homes we leave and the homes we learn to make for ourselves. The first nest we encounter in the book is a wasps’ nest, for home in these complex and sometimes sonically dense poems is neither an easy nor sentimental thing. These are emphatically poems of place as well, from opening poems grounded in the fundamentalist culture of the rural South, through poems of travel and dislocation in Ireland and elsewhere, to a final section emphasizing the repurposed and reimagined—the old church pew at the foot of the bed. Ultimately, this book is about the rituals and practices of home we carry with us, whether the formal vows of a wedding that is still unacknowledged by law, or the informal lore of gardening.
Born and raised in rural Arkansas, Ed Madden is the author of two books of poetry, Signals, which won the South Carolina Poetry Book Prize, and Prodigal: Variations, as well as the chapbook, My Father’s House.