All Over the Page - Tamp by Denton Loving - Poetry Month Special Event

This month's All Over the Page will host Denton Loving, Poet and recent honoree of Humanities Tennessee's inaugural Tennessee Book Award for Poetry for his most recent collection, Tamp. The event will be held in conjunction with and recorded for the Knox County Public Library's, The Beat, podcast. 

Denton Loving’s second collection of poetry centers on the bond that endures between father and son, even after death. In plainspoken poetry that is often narrative in form, the writer’s personal experiences living on an inherited cattle farm and tending to an aging orchard are detailed. Loving explores and celebrates the physical and psychological landscapes of his native Appalachia – its mountains and valleys, its flora and fauna – with language that is lyrical and bursting with sudden shocks of emotional power. These are the poems that serve as witness to the natural world, blurred with history and mythology to examine the eternal father-son paradigm. 

Denton Loving is the author of the poetry collections Crimes Against Birds and Tamp, recipient of the inaugural Tennessee Book Award for Poetry. He is a co-founder and editor at EastOver Press and its literary journal Cutleaf. His fiction, poetry, essays and reviews have appeared in numerous publications including The Kenyon Review, Iron Horse Literary Review and Ecotone. His third collection of poems, Feller, is forthcoming in 2025 from Mercer University Press.