Beautiful Trouble

In her first collection of poems, Kansas native Amy Fleury captures images of dragging clotheslines, baked lawns, and sweet potato babies, inserting them with an earnest dignity into her stories of midwestern life. Beautiful Trouble explores the subtleties of landscape, place, families, girlhood, womanhood, and everyday existence on the prairie. Fleury writes of the Midwest with authenticity, speaks of romance with delicate allure, and recalls the heartbreak of childhood without self-pity. In meditations on resilience and life's contradictions, Fleury engages her characters fully and paints their souls and sensations evenly in language both rare and beautiful. She is a poet in love with sound and its power to summon majesty from quotidian scenes. Her poems are brief and striking, depending on exquisite word choice and balance to achieve a simple order on the page.

A native of rural northeast Kansas, Amy Fleury earned an M.F.A. from McNeese State University and has held the Nadya Aisenberg Fellowship at the MacDowell Colony. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in numerous journals, including Southern Poetry Review, North American Review, 21st, Laurel Review, South Dakota Review, and Prairie Schooner. She is an associate professor of English at Washburn University and the managing editor of Woodley Memorial Press in Topeka, Kansas.