Birds of Sympathy

After Douglas Smith and George Looney graduated from Bowling Green State University with their MFA degrees, Douglas' in fiction and George's in poetry, they never lived in the same city again. They visited one another when they could, met at AWP Conferences when both could get funding from the educational institutions they were working at, and they spent time over two different summers in Austin, Texas researching the William Goyen special issue of Mid-American Review. And they sent letters back and forth through the US mail. These poems started out as those letters. At some point they decided to work with a particular series of those letters, to hone them into poems, and to create this chapbook of corresponding poems. Sadly, Douglas did not live to see it in print.