has a long history of being successful at life. She's taken home the first place ribbon at the Georgia State Fair Chili Cook Off, TWICE, and is currently the reigning Champion of the Women's Southeast Division Mud Wrestling Association. This is her first book of poetry. "Cormac McCarthy once opined that he wrote few women characters because he did not understand them. Misty Cosgrove's poetry provides the voices that McCarthy's novels lack, while providing a similar aesthetic. Each poem has a great sense of time and place, but still manages to tap into the universal. Misty provides us with a litany of grotesqueries and casual atrocities, but never fails to provide some hope scraped from the bottom of the barrel. I can think of no one better suited to provide empathy for both martyrs and monsters, and isn't that what literature is for?" , author of "In Misty Cosgrove's writing - as within our dreams - no figure or fragment is incidental or without meaning. Consequently, entire stories emerge with just a few essential words or gestures: We glimpse a man's past and future in a moment of silent chivalry for a sex doll; we witness a woman's lifetime of violence through the quiet washing of a dress on a porch. Cosgrove stares unflinchingly into the hearts and bowels of her subjects and records with charm and imagination, though without false sentiment, everything telling that she observes. There is pain in the humour and humour in the pain. A woman has laid herself bare for us, laid her people bare, and in turn she has unveiled a nation. Sugarfoot has invited us into her America - an America whose death rattle is indistinguishable from riotous laughter." , enigma