David McKain has published five other books, among them Spellbound: Growing Up in God's Country, winner of the Associated Writing Program's Award for Creative Non-Fiction, a nominee for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and a selection by Annie Dillard as one of her favorite memoirs published between 1917 and 1992. McKain has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lila Wallace Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation.

“Whether writing about South American poets dying at the hands of fascism, or an old woman freezing in a rented room, or his own cruelties, David McKain knows ‘sorrow is everywhere.’ Yet he also knows ‘beyond sorrow there’s music.’ It is the music beyond sorrow that has made these clear-eyed compassionate poems. McKain’s tender, earnest vision is an honest and loving gift to us all.”
—David Budbill

“There is a strong sense of communion in all of David McKain’s poems—a seeking to share with others the moments of perception which fire his poetry into being. Call it a sacramental way of looking at life, animal and human. McKain’s poetry is an expression of a whole temperment.”
—Edwin Honig