What is Andrew Hudgins reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Andrew Hudgins, author of Shut Up, You’re Fine!: Instructive Poetry for Very, Very Bad Children. Illustrated by the distinguished artist and graphic designer Barry Moser, Shut Up, You’re Fine! includes such heart-warming titles as “Playing Houth,” “The Thumping of the Bed,” “Two Starving Kids in Africa,” and “Daddy, Are We Meat?”

His previous poetry collections include Ecstatic in the Poison and Saints & Strangers, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; After the Lost War, which received the Poetry Prize; and The Never-Ending, a finalist for the National Book Award.

Hudgins's poems available online include "Walking a True Line," "Blur," "Day Job and Night Job," "In," and a zombie haiku.

His Writers Read entry opens:

I’ve just finished Charles Sweetman’s Enterprise, Inc, a very funny book that satirizing white-color jobs. Imagine Dilbert as poetry, with more pathos in the humor. Betty Adcock’s Slantwise moves, slantwise, from Texas and back--through the rest of the South, into New York City after the bombing of the twin towers, and drops in on the Greek isles and the Andes. In one poem, Adcock meditates on being called “Betty” instead of “Elizabeth,” her given name:

After all

what could be odder than a woman poet from Texas?

Give her a trash name too and there’s no telling

what she might do, aiming for Parnassus

and the solar plexus.[read on]

Writers Read: Andrew Hudgins.

--Marshal Zeringue