“Love Song to the Demon-Possessed Pigs of Gadara navigates the ground between spiritual possession and emotional dispossession, between the promises of religion and the chokehold of prescribed masculinity in the duck hunting, strip-mall, suicidal South, mapping as they go our shared struggle toward intimacy, connection, sanity, and love. Laser-like focus, rich musicality, and an unflinching bravery in the face of a brutal familial and geographical history—these are the qualities that draw me to Fargason’s work and that make many of his poems so unforgettable.”—James Kimbrell, Florida State University

“Every sense engaged, each filament of intellect glowing, memory fully aflame—it’s not easy to survive such aliveness. So implies poet Fargason in this Love Song. Heights of awareness and passion and fullness are met by counterparts in depths of doubt and despair, of a past that ground down, that haunt writer and reader. This is a book of darkness and hope, of vision and rage. Reading Love Song to the Demon-Possessed Pigs of Gadara made me feel that I am not alone in the grief and fear of this world—I am part of it and it a part of me, but that also one (I, we, the poet, the reader) is integrally part of something larger: the project of life as something utterly worth living as deeply as possible, paths and pasts and pigs and pain and all.”—Brenda Shaughnessy, judge, Iowa Poetry Prize

“In Will Fargason’s first book, Love Song to the Demon-Possessed Pigs of Gadara, accelerating phrasal momentum and sharp figurative detail merge to put us in the prison made by child abuse and chronic pain. The narrow confines of such experience, its isolating effect, remind me of Elaine Scarry’s descriptions of torture. Fargason’s enactments of what’s happening to him and what has happened warp percep­tion, as when he sees a lake as ‘a window I want to roll down.’ But he can’t. He’s trapped. Entrances and exits are repeatedly inverted, mirrors mirroring mirrors. The speed of the poems and their disarmingly sudden stops keep us off-guard, push us past what we think we know. About anything—pain, death, fear, anger. These poems wake their readers up. What else is poetry for?”—Elizabeth Arnold, author, Skeleton Coast