Murder Ballad
“I have a feeling Jane Springer met the devil at the crossroads. There’s not a note she can’t pluck, and the music is like no one else’s: rich as the red clay of Georgia, startling as a raccoon’s bite, ‘crazy as a shithouse rat’ and cool as sweet tea on a sultry afternoon. There’s some nittygritty here, hauled up from the freezer chest on the porch, unearthed like a mastodon that’s been buried far longer than we can imagine. And there is tremendous vitality and sublimity in this ‘dark county of the heart’ where her music comes from. Whatever devilish bargain has been struck, it has been a boon to all parties. Hallelujah for us all.” —D.A. Powell“Not since I read James Agee’sA Death in the Familyhave I been so compelled to stare into the eyeballs of chiggers and mildew.  Jane Springer is on a thin reed in the present moment reciting incantatory poems. May I plainly say, ‘What a goddamn beautiful book this is.’” —Jane Miller“Jane Springer’s poems are dazzling, devastating and utterly original—sound-rich, sensual, sensational—you will be carried away.” —Naomi Shihab Nye“[Murder Ballad] is a tangled ode to the South, filled with coon stew, frog guts, pig shit, the violence of rape, slavery, and regret. Springer wrote it with the deep, sisterly love of a drunken, wayward brother she knows better than anyone.” —Ploughshares“Traversing the despair of the rural south, Springer exploits the urgency and dread of every keening murder ballad, showing how that cleaving is both our undoing and our salvation.” —Rain Taxi“Springer shows time and again that this music is an inheritance, the murder ballad that dwells in ‘the dark county of the heart,’ and her poems hold the tension of wanting ‘to erase the ancient, violent beauty / in the devil of not loving what we love.’” —Phantom Limb