Urbilly: Poems

Author: Michael Dowdy

Publisher: Main Street Rag (2017)

Winner of the 2017 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award

Urbilly? Think antic field guide to parts (un)known & exploited. Mountain / megacity mashups, rural / urban hullabaloo, New River / Gowanus cocktails. Backwoods & Brooklyn. Mountaintop removal & Edison bulbs, landfill & farm-to-table, Muriel Rukeyser & Big Daddy Kane, James Still & girders of steel. Think Urbilly as the anti-Hillbilly Elegy, as an autoethnography of the hipster-hillbilly.

“Urbilly is an astounding debut because Michael Dowdy understands our peril. His ability to layer so much, sometimes with humor, in such a small space creates a mountainous effect. A father’s love for his young daughter fuels a rage over planetary violence. Traces of urban and rural, spit and shame, rapacious fracking and mountaintop removal, always the personal and political—these poems are living membranes that we can see worlds through.”

–Mauricio Kilwein Guevara