Ohio Violence starts with scandal: the narrator leads the high school football coach into the cornfields, but as she promises, "nothing happened." In the fields, in the woods, in the dark water of Ohio, something is happening. Girls disappear, turn on each other. Men watch from the rearview as the narrator hedges, changes her mind, then shows all in this break-out collection of bittersweet and cataclysmic lyrics.
"Alison Stine writes, 'Believe me. I am telling you a story,' and the story she tells us we believe as it unfolds. The poems are moving—beautiful, tragic, death-haunted, and uncanny—like old folk songs and murder ballads—lovely on the tongue, heavy on the heart. As a narrator, Stine does not and will not swerve when faced with the brutal, the adamantine and the ordinary damage that equals a life."—Eric Pankey, judge and author of Reliquaries