In Glory River, David Huddle's poems pit precise observation, extravagant language, and humor against despair in an attempt to find a way to live in a new century in which the values of the past are dissolving and those of the future are frightening. Huddle opens with a sequence of exceptional tales about an imaginary hamlet in the mountains of Virginia. The residents of Glory River are rough, crude, and full of fight, but eager to tell their stories, ""to explain how / in that place they had become the people / they were."" Huddle also includes a series of poems exploring modern life, touching upon subjects as diverse as memory, family, art, politics, and pain. Accessible and often humorous, the poems in Glory River range from the strange and extraordinary happenings in the fantastical Virginia town to the painful, hopeful, and no less magical situations that can occur in real lives.