At Rest in My Father's House

“In the raw, real light of Jolliff’s memory we are drawn to his deep sense of empathy for and identification with the hardscrabble farming families of his rural Ohio homeland, folks ever at the mercy of the weather and market’s whims. All the unforgettable stories [are] told seamlessly by a poet sure of his voice and his craft.”
—Suzanne Underwood Rhodes, Poet Laureate of Arkansas, author of FLYING YELLOW

“These poems glean grace from the abandoned fields and towns of a Midwest childhood that led, eventually, to an academic life. God and banjos, family and loss weave through these rich pages. The well-rung lines narrate vivid vignettes, and then each poem turns, and its meaning leaps beyond the immediate confines of its purported subject. The result is verse that sings, that bites, that haunts..”
—Jeffrey Bilbro, editor in chief, FRONT PORCH REPUBLIC

“I don’t know of any other poet who tills the dark soil of memory’s hard geography as deeply and beautifully as Bill Jolliff. Through the powers of his keen ear, eye, and finely honed lyric, Jolliff makes the small and insignificant necessary and extraordinary. Each poem bristles with fierce energy. Each poem jolts me to a state of utter wonder and awe.”
—Gina Ochsner, winner of the Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver and Kurt Vonnegut Awards for fiction, author of THE HIDDEN LETTERS OF VELTA B

“Bill’s poems come with a mule’s epiphanic kick, breathing histories of lived life in rural Ohio that prove to be accessible and revelatory. They carry the regional authenticity of diction, a syntactical, sonic and rhetorical grit, and hold an intergenerational tension having to do with a disappearing or already disappeared way of life: family farms transformed and subsumed by agribusiness. If you wish to understand the rural half of America, you must read this!.”
—Dave Mehler, author of ROADWORTHY, editor of TRIGGERFISH CRITICAL REVIEW

“By day, William Jolliff is a college professor in Western Oregon; by night he remains a chore-bound farm boy in Southern Ohio. It is this deeply soiled and dieseled version of the poet that so eloquently inhabits the difficult beauties of the place and people he is from. AT REST IN MY FATHER'S HOUSE is almost anything but that. But his sweat-soaked, banjo-stricken lines remind me, again and again, of that ancient dictum from the Scriptures: 'Strive to enter into rest.'”
—Paul J. Willis, author of SOMEWHERE TO FOLLOW

“The poems in Jolliff’s newest collection are saturated with exquisite detail and imagery, unforgettable characters, and dry wit. Reading these poems is akin to reading a collection of interrelated short stories grounded in the rural and the particular. I am confident readers will be grateful for the journey into the lives of people wrestling with death, loss, and hope.”
—Nathaniel Lee Hansen, editor of THE WINDHOVER