About the Book…

“Loving manages to walk both deliberately and carefully through his lived or imagined mire with elegance and ease. He has mastered the art (and placement) of the question in his work.” – Maura Snell, The Tishman Review

“These are not poems with the natural world as a backdrop, but fully human observations and explorations of a world in which human nature is natural, if often pain-inducing and destructive.” – Meredith Sue Willis, Books for Readers

“Denton does what all great poets do and he typically does this with a narrative arc reminiscent of someone like Ron Rash. His poems are short stories. His poems are novels. This is definitely someone who is going to set his own place at the table in the very near future.” – David Joy, author of Where All Light Tends to Go

“In a cultural and historic moment where the pressure of reality seems to infiltrate all of our dreaming spaces, Crimes Against Birds works to recapture lost territory. Denton Loving’s collection exerts its own pressure of imagination toward the reclamation of the pastoral’s way of knowing.” – Paul Pickering, Fogged Clarity

“Set among the narrow mountain roads, apple orchards, and cattle pastures of southern Appalachia, these poems push beyond gentle, bucolic portraits of nature. They ask us to wake up even as we descend into an underworld of dreams.” – Emily Choate, Chapter 16

“The spine of Loving’s work is connected directly through his land. His dynamic is the love of his portion of the earth, fresh fruits, fresh fields, fresh grain, obviously entrusted to him by those smart poetry gods in the sky. He’s more than a nature poet. The dynamic of Loving’s work is for a better world. And this is exactly the way to change it. He can also photograph a sharp scene.” – Grace Cavalieri, Washington Independent Review of Books