Southern Bred

"Poetry is a language that speaks to the heart, and Charles Ghigna uses that tender, heart-piercing language to bring us closer to his southern soul. A collection as beautiful as it is heartfelt, Southern Bred transports and enchants.” — Patti Callahan Henry, NYT Bestselling author of The Secret Book of Flora Lea

“You don’t so much read these poems as fall into them. It’s like plummeting into someone else’s memories—a great rush of beauty and darkness, joy and weirdness. As soon as you finish one, you want to start over again from the beginning. This book is such a gift.” — Gin Phillips, author of Fierce Kingdom and Family Law

“With the gift of poetry, what he calls “the field and stream of consciousness,” Charles Ghigna has sketched a word portrait - indelible images both lovely and hard - of life in our rural, God-haunted South. In this memoir of verse, Ghigna makes clear, as he has before, that he is one of the finest poets of our time.” —Frye Gaillard, author of The Southernization of America

“Ghigna’s Southern voice comes through more palpably here than in anything I've read in a long while. I am already transported and in love with it. I keep waiting for sweet tea to just magically show up on my table." — Nikki Grimes, author of Ordinary Hazards: A Memoir

"I was utterly engrossed while reading Southern Bred, reliving every childhood memory, even though they weren’t my own. I’ll never understand how Charles Ghigna can evoke so much – a prick of tears, a knowing grin, memories of home, questions about life – with so few words. Yet he does it so beautifully." — Kelly Kazek, author of The Southern Handbook

“Southern Bred is a look back and a look forward, complete with honeysuckle and shadows, holy spaces and merciless stains. These poems alternately terrify and comfort, painting a captivating portrait of a boy, a poet, a man—and the indelible impact of the land and family to which one belongs. This collection is one of Charles Ghigna's best!” — Irene Latham, author of Leaving Gee’s Bend

"The poems in this collection move easily between dreams and waking life, situating themselves in that liminal space where insights arise, memories unfold, and time expands. In lucid language charged with meaning, Ghigna carries us along on ventures into the past that resist the sentimental and take us somewhere deeper: to the mysteries of fathers and sons, the suddenness of beauty, the surprise of death, and the holiness of life itself." — Jennifer Horne, former Alabama Poet Laureate and author of Odyssey of a Wandering Mind