�Charlene Spearen's fine collection of poetry is a book about fate, doubt, and the aspects of faith by which we navigate the exquisite disasters of village, family, and personal life. Eudora Welty wrote that she loved her own fiction's characters; likewise Spearen depicts her people without sentimentality yet in tender clarity. She delights in paradox, opposition, uncertainty, even as she displays a keen sense of formal control and poetic design. Narrative and lyrical, plainspoken with subtle religious intonations, the poems in A Book of Exquisite Disasters make �mouth music� that's rich, sonorous, and capable of twang as well as solace.��David Baker, poetry editor, Kenyon Review