Dolores Hayden’s American Yard includes lyrical views of courtship, marriage, and motherhood as well as narrative poems revealing a wide-ranging historical imagination. She wraps everyday life in casually elegant metrical music and distills emotion to delicate shades. Widely recognized for her distinctive non-fiction books about landscapes, Hayden has crafted a rich, sophisticated collection of poems rooted in diverse American places.

“Dolores Hayden infuses formalism with spiky wit and colloquial charm in poems that show us America from Maine to California, from Teddy Roosevelt’s childhood to that of her own delightful, ever-so-modern daughter. She gives us a land of motorcycles, flea markets, old houses in new siding, and gardens that still speak the old victorian “language of flowers”--but most of all she gives us the America within ourselves, a place of violence and drift but also--still!--sweetness and beauty.”

-—Katha Pollitt

“The dense verbal texture of Dolores Hayden’s poems pulls against their geographical and historical sweep. Lush with sensuous detail, American Yard is also ambitious and expansive; Hayden maps matters large and small with elegance and authority.”

--Rachel Hadas

“Dolores Hayden writes beautifully-made poems that are both erudite and wise. American Yard is an auspicious, full-throated debut.”

--Elizabeth Alexander

Widow Sewing Work Clothes Quilts,
Gee's Bend, Alabama

She cuts his shirts and jeans and overalls,
piecing the quilts to keep six children warm
as early winter needles through log walls.

Late fall, frost rims the creek. The weather stalls.
Her husband’s dead--took chill after a storm.
She grasps his shirts and jeans and overalls,

unstitches pockets, rips his 40 talls
with knees knocked-out from plowing round the farm.
As early winter needles through log walls,

she saves the chest and shoulders, strips all
sound cloth from thigh and seat, takes out an arm.
She clasps his shirts and jeans and overalls--

beneath the pockets, some fresh denim falls
inside a faded field. She's strapped, needs swarm.
As early winter needles through log walls,

old sun-struck cloth wraps babies like fine shawls,
embraces them with shapes a man’s limbs form.
She holds his shirts and jeans and overalls
as early winter needles through log walls.

Dolores Hayden’s poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, Southwest Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Slate, and many other journals and anthologies. She has won the Poetry Society of America’s The Writer Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award, and the Boyle Farber Award from the New England Poetry Club.