Poetry. Winner of the 2013 Weatherford Award for Poetry. "Richard Hague is a naturalist who comes from a landscape that has suffered the systematic removal of Nature. 'I come here to commune / with nothing,' he says in one poem. Indeed, the ever-present industrial and chemical waste littering the southeastern Ohio Hague chronicles, suggests the awful darkness of nothing. This is a world of carnage and the great diminishment of human hope; from strip mines and steel mills smoking in their prime to the wreckage of their leavings, Hague summons the courage to speak against the ruin. He speaks for the wild things and their place, and he speaks for the people who live with profound and unrelenting loss. This is the land and these are the people who have paid the highest price for the so-called benefits and conveniences of modern American life. What we have given up in trade is incalculable. The poems in this generous collection, therefore, are wonders of bravery; they come from the ancient spirit of poetry whose task is to name, to say, and to make account, and to bring the ruined world into burnishing contact with beauty."—Maurice Manning