Southern poetry with a gothic twist.A Southerner by birth, Susan Swartwout's history and writing are steeped in the gothic elements of quotidian life in the Deep South, a celebration of difference and the uncommon--odd beauties who embellish our plain lives. These poems explore the lives of freaks--celebrities of Southern fairs' sideshows--such as conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker's married lives, the Fat Lady's work schedule, Tom Thumb's Barnum-warped ego, all parallel to the hidden desires, plots, and jealousies of the rest of us. Our exterior normality belies the internal twisted landscapes--how complicity and silence echo abuse, how depression infects entire families, how a five-year-old learns to use words as weapons, how human need dispels language's boundaries. From circus oddities to real-life boogeymen, from Louisiana to a Central American village, earth has no dearth of the gothic's strange fruit, illuminating the complexity of what it is to be human.… (more)