The Dix Hill Blues

poems by

Earl Carlton Huband III

ISBN: 978-1-964277-68-4, 86 pages, $15 (+ shipping)

Release Date: February 10, 2026

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Earl Carlton Huband is the author of The Innocence of Education [Longleaf Press, 2018] and In the Coral Reef of the Market [Main Street Rag Publishing, 2020]. The latter won the 2021 Peace Corps Writers Best Book of Poetry Award. Huband’s poems have often appeared in The Main Street Rag and The Road Not Taken – notably, “A Double Take on the Middle East” – as well as in the annual Pinesong, Heron Clan, and Kakalak anthologies. His poem “An Incomplete History of a Storied Work” was an NCPS Poet Laureate Award finalist in 2023. Huband and his wife, the poet Priscilla Webster-Williams, live in Durham, NC.

In The Dix Hill Blues, Earl Carlton Huband III pays tribute and gives voice to his turbulent, troubled family: their griefs, loves, delusions, and sufferings. The final poem, “Invocation: A Benediction,” ends “…give me your leave to use the power of words; / out of this passage may we light the darkness.” In powerful, achingly honest poems, Huband shines a searchlight on his forebears. He teaches us to “Stay with grief,” and offers mercy. ~Joan Barasovska

By turns, Earl Huband’s new book of poems, The Dix Hill Blues, is whimsical, sonically resonant, deeply contemplative, and seemingly conjured from the intimate vaults of memory. Huband proves himself an acolyte of form, utilizing the sonnet, villanelle, and sestina – with memorable narrative salted in – to craft a number of these moving, beautifully elegiac poems that explore the glories and travails of family, profound loss, and abiding love. These poems gaze with steely resolve into the tangled abyss of drawing breath on this mysterious planet. Yet, as the speaker assures us in the knockout final line of this luminous volume, “out of this passage may we light the darkness.” ~Joseph Bathanti, North Carolina Poet Laureate (2012-2014) & author of Restoring Sacred Art

In his latest collection, The Dix Hill Blues, Earl Carlton Huband III showcases the grace of a mature poetic talent unflagging in its clarity, honesty, and devotion to form. These are gentle poems of flawless execution that examine personal losses and family history with a taut precision that underscores and echoes the shadowy depths of dark feelings recollected, re-explored, and ultimately re-embraced. A bittersweet current of grief flows through this lovely and memorable book. ~Michael Colonnese

Aunt Margaret Sings the Dix Hill Blues

She always hugged us much too tightly:
smothering in her heaving bosom.
After she died, I heard the whispers:
how she thought she was a movie star,
how my father played to her each time
she cracked, was bundled into the car,
and dashed off to her press conference,
there to feel the limelight once again,
acting out at the state hospital.

The Farm Guardian

~for Viola Harris Brown

Momma, is that you at the door again?
It’s late. There’s no reason for you to be up.

I’m sorry, son. It’s just that I thought I heard –

Heard what, Momma? There isn’t anyone out there.

It’s just that I thought I heard . . . someone crying.

Momma, there’s nobody out there. Go to bed.
Get some rest. It isn’t good for you
to be up like this, night after night, listening.

But son, it sounded like a baby calling –

Damn it, Momma. Don’t be ridiculous.
There’s not a child within a mile of here.

It’s just that it sounded like . . . it sounds like Curtis!

Momma, Curtis died sixty years ago.

He needs me to take him to the doctor, bad,
but Pete won’t let me go. I’m afraid.
Pete doesn’t believe in doctors, and the hospital
so far away. – Curtis won’t stop crying.

Momma! Momma, please! Please don’t worry.
I’ll take care of Curtis for you, Momma.
Come to bed, Momma. Come to bed.

The Burning of the Family Book

I aimed to murder my grandfather,
my mother’s father, the old tyrant,
and I took the book he always kept
out of the hands of the family,
the book that contained all our secrets,
our scarred and skeletal history.
I buried him, and I burned the book . . .
but before I burned it, I read it.

Strange reading: with those flames licking up,
how the pages of that bible writhed.
I was certain, when I burned that book,
I could redeem my generation,
I would help heal each soul that it burned.
Now, the more I wrestle with that book,
the more I unearth my grandfather.
I see and I burn. For him I burn.

Helping the Dying

Approach the dying gently. Leave some space.
Turn about, and discover how, each day,
barriers fall. Ride out the storms with grace.
Wait for small waves. Cling but don’t cling. The way
to sail will clear, though grief will pilot. Stay
with grief. Allow yourself to feel its pain.
Tissue rots in wounds that refuse to drain.

One tube for the left side, one for the right,
body, ageing vessel, dry-docked for repair,
the bow still proud, erect against the night,
the crust of barnacles –– here, there, and there.
Somewhere across the yard a mournful air
stirs memory, an open sea, a wedge
that breaks as water drips at the bay’s edge.

Night gathers. You, rocking, on watch, alone,
observe – out of fog – the other boat emerge.
Nervous, you inwardly shrink, swear in a tone
that unmasks your fear. Feel the tidal surge
within you, the wild, wild, thrashing, purge
the fear. The other boat closes in the spray.
Empty. The sea, still. Gently rock away.