It was my great pleasure to come upon Peach Box and Verge by L. Ward Abel. The poems are strong, seemingly concocted from the natural and unnatural environments of the South, an admixture of metaphor and riversong. One may find lovely lines herein like "We ramble beside the hot verge/oblivious to roads." And while Abel is comfortable with nature, with what Pliny called “either a kind parent or a merciless stepmother,” he is also the poet of the particular, drawing deep image from the everyday. He evokes doorways, London, dumpsters, churches, mills and tracks. And from all this he makes a music, which, we hope, is the job of the true poet.

-Corey Mesler, author of Talk: A Novel in Dialogue and Chin-Chin in Eden, a chapbook of poems