Wilson, Edward: A Pound of Cure

Cider Press Review, paperback

Publication Date: August 15, 2025

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Advance praise for A Pound of Cure:

"The poems in A Pound of Cure have a clarity of vision, a wisdom earned in a life weighed and measured. At times narrative, at times lyrical, in this collection we read of a Luna moth remembered forty years, Civil War photos, a tenant house seen with '...wind in your face like a dog / from the backseat of your father's Buick.' Edward Wilson is a historian, an archivist, but foremost a poet who takes his time mining the human condition for a pound of cure that, if we are paying attention, might heal wounds we've long carried as well." --Rick Campbell, author of Fish Streets Before Dawn

"I have never read poems that pick me up and move me around like Edward Wilson's do. Walk with him with words he uses like musical notes, like a palette of paint, and he'll take you from a Kentucky coal mine (where you smell the stink) to a North Coast redwood forest (walking by flashlight when the road runs out), to a West Nashville night club (so hot you feel sweat start). These are poems you can spend a lot of time thinking about or you can let them speak directly to your body, bringing you into a world of feeling that knows your heart by name." --Barbara Brown Taylor, author of An Altar in the World

"In A Pound of Cure, Wilson breathes language into life and wraps it around towering redwoods, frost-covered pines, angels leading Lot's wife away from Sodom and Gomorrah, the Civil War dead. These poems shimmer with distilled essence of Southern sunsets and burning stars that always follow, captured line-by-line from the opening page to the final sentence. Gorgeous." --Andrew Geyer, editor of Southern Voices: Fifty Contemporary Poets