Hush

"Interweaving several narrative lines, Carlos Dews has fashioned a raw, suspenseful autobiographical narrative. His prose is clear and steady, one sentence after another pulling the reader forward and down deeper into many overlapping raw, eye-opening stories of human survival. Hush has a gripping, mesmerizing power that will bring you in and not let you go." - Billy Collins, U.S. Poet Laureate (2001-2003) and author of The Rain in Portugal (Random House, 2016).

"Hush is a book that builds new neighborhoods in your heart. Children never forgetting, autofiction playing Helter Skelter with history, and love like diamond-encrusted mud everywhere you step: watch out or life will turn into a gun that eats you...What are we without our unforgettings? Hush is a roadmap for all who care to travel to their own places of haunting, and come out the other side well-companioned and wiser. This is a book for every month of the year, including the month that time forgot."- Susan Bradley Smith, Author of the verse novels Gladland, and The Postcult Heart, and the memoir Friday Forever.

"Hush is a deeply felt, tightly plotted tale of generations of cruel men and their suffering wives, living in hardscrabble poverty-an instant classic! Stark as the portraits might be, they are always rendered with compassion. Dews has a heart as big as Texas." - Edmund White, author of A Boy's Own Story and A Saint From Texas.

"...This is an emotional and moving story of violence and limitation in which women are controlled, either directly or through social expectation, and men always have a place to turn to. Carlos Dews defies nostalgia in this reimagining of classic American tropes." - Sarah Schulman, author of The Cosmopolitans.

"If Robert Altman had ever gone down to East Texas, he couldn't have portrayed the cacophonous and diverse journey of the Dews family with any more veracity, harsh honesty, or grit...Hush is a masterpiece."- David Keplinger, author of Another City (2018) and The Long Answer: New and Selected Poems (2020)

"... Carlos Dews's characters are rugged woodcut figures out of Dürer." - Michael Carroll, winner of the Sue Kaufman Prize for first fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for Little Reef and Other Stories.

"Dews tells a 'story of his own' by weaving rural Southern folklife and lore into the family history of the Scogins and Dews up on Fitzy Junction in Nacogdoches, Texas, where wisteria vines climb in heart pine woods, cornbread soaks in buttermilk, and the only son of an only son of an only son daydreams beneath 'a field of fabric.'"   - Alex Gregor, author of The Pollen Path (Radioactive Cloud, 2019)