HammCovermuseum editor Justin Hamm’s debut collection Lessons in Ruin (Aldrich Press) is now available for pre-order. Click here for more information.

Bruce Guernsey, former editor of Spoon River Poetry Review and author of From Rain: Poems, 1970-2010, calls Lessons in Ruin “generous” and “wonderfully accessible and human poetry.”

Michael Walsh, author of The Dirt Riddles and winner of the Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize, says, “With sensibility and vulnerability, Hamm’s poems alternate between gritty lives and songs that contemplate, for example, the holiness of rust and the correct wording necessary to resurrect. The rich, decaying heartland he evokes leaves the reader to wonder whether this land, for all its fruitfulness and abundance, might not need us after all.”