"I can't imagine a better Georgic for our age than Chad Parmenter's When I Was Baptized in Missouri Dirt. On one hand, a book about coming of age on a small farm, it is also a book that reaches for God without losing hold of chickens or cicadas. Not since Heaney have I read poetry that speaks with such abundant lyrical freshness." -Rodney Jones, National Book Critics Circle Award Winner "As I read these exquisitely crafted poems, I realized that they aren't about the past, not ultimately, and that the careful and accurate scrutiny of their gaze unleashes reverberations that reach us here, again and again, with moments of stunning insight and of real beauty." -Davis McCombs, Yale Young Poets Series Award Winner "Parmenter constructs a child's world of loneliness and terror-including the terror of finding out who you might actually be. . . . These poems are alive to and in difficult knowledge, and they make mystery articulate without diminishing the dark wonder it contains. " -Jonathan Farmer, author of That Peculiar Affirmative Chad Parmenter is a Missouri-based poet and writer. His work has appeared in publications including Best American Poetry, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, and At Length. His writing about poetry has appeared in publications including American Poetry Review and Memorious. His chapbook Weston's Unsent Letters to Modotti won the Snowbound Chapbook Contest at Tupelo Press. His book Batmanticism was published by In Case of Emergency Press. His plays The Rat Trap and The Short Knight were featured in the Comedies in Concert series of the University of Missouri, where he received his PhD.