The Law of Truly Large Numbers is a book about coming to terms with loss and the arrival of unexpected, perhaps undeserved, love. Based on the statistical principle that in a truly large sample set anything outrageous is likely to happen, this book explores not only the outrageous things that have already happened--the loss of siblings and parents; the loss of home, friends, and relatives; the weight of illness and physical aging--but also the discovery and rediscovery of friendship as well as romantic and familial connections. Often locating themselves where mourning and celebration, grief and humor intersect, these poems consider the sometimes unexpected ways in which grief might open new channels for understanding and, ultimately, for love.

Kimbrell helps us see into the mysteries and losses that haunt our world--primal, incessant, hidden, and true as 'fog rising from our wordless mouths.'--David Baker

My Psychic is a book about the soul--what it might be, under what circumstances it might show itself to the rest of us curious, bewildered living. The center sequence of poems elegizing his mother's death movingly establishes an unbroken continuity between the living and the dead.

James Kimbrell is the author of The Gatehouse Heaven and co-translator of Three Poets of Modern Korea. He is currently the director of the creative writing program at Florida State University.

Smote is a book of the dark reality of our daily existence; it is a book of abiding grace.--Robert Olen Butler

I release you like the crank-addled truck driver
releases his cargo at the midnight dock
until the warehouse is one in a trail
of crumbs, little light left on behind him.

James Kimbrell is the author of The Gatehouse Heaven and My Psychic, and the co-translator of Three Poets of Modern Korea. He been the recipient of the Discovery/The Nation Award, a Whiting Award, a fellowship from the NEA, and a Morton Prize.

Kimbrell sings a serious song. . . . The poems are deft and sure, there is a sense of vision in them, and I have the feeling that this is the start of something significant.-from the Foreword by Charles Wright

In his debut collection (selected by Charles Wright as the 1997 winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry), Kimbrell revisits the mysterious landscapes of childhood and returns with poems that fathom meaning yet retain a sense of awe. The book's title section, a poignant ten-part poem, portrays a son's lifelong struggle to connect with a father made absent by mental and physical illness: It's quite/The wonder, what madness can do for a man, //Much more than me far below the harsh light of heaven/Down here, in the make-shift center of this world. The Gatehouse Heaven serves as testament and guide to the kind of love that lies beyond anger.

James Kimbrell has received a Ford Foundation Fellowship, a Henry Hoynes Fellowship, and the Ruth Lilly Fellowship. He was twice winner of the Academy of American Poet's Prize and also received the Discovery/The Nation Award and Poetry magazine's Bess Hokin Prize. His poems and co-translations (with Jung Yul Yu) have appeared in magazines such as Poetry, The Antioch Review, The Quarterly, and Field. He is currently completing his Ph.D. in creative writing at the University of Missouri, Columbia.

Selected by Charles Wright as the 1997 Winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry.