James Ralston, in his debut collection, delivers with an edgy honesty and complex humor the difficulties of loving and being loved. His poems explore sex and separation, the highs of intimacy with someone that devolve into something lesser, and yet he says, 'Don't think of us as failed or sad./As love drops down into its grave, /finally deep enough, /imagine us as brave at last.' There's a fierce precision like that evident throughout, a poetry that dares and distills, and is exquisitely heard, his ears providing a music that authenticates as it makes us wince with the pleasure of recognition.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

James (Jim) Ralston lives on three and a half acres between Rocky Gap Creek and Evitts Creek outside of Cumberland, Maryland, a post-industrial town still trying to find its way forward. This land and this Appalachian town are the settings for most of the Lyrics for a Low Noon.

Ralston teaches English and Theatre at Blue Ridge Technical and Community College, Martinsburg, West Virginia. He has also taught at Shepherd University (Shepherdstown, WV), Frostburg State University (Frostburg, MD), and Central Michigan University (Mt. Pleasant, Michigan), with a few other short stops along the way.

His publications include The Choice of Emptiness, a series of essays that also works as a novel; The Appalachian Grammar Shop; and, over a span of 35 years, numerous essays and poems in The Sun: A Magazine of Ideas. As well, his work has appeared in various other journals and newspapers, including the Utne Reader and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. For fifteen years, between 1990 and 2005, he was a regular columnist for the Charleston Gazette, West Virginia's state paper.

He has written four plays, acted in some of them, directed some of them, most recently "35 Folds to the Moon" at the New Embassy Theatre in Cumberland and the Apollo Theatre in Martinsburg.

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