This book draws on the works and lives of six poets, illustrating how the state of Florida inspired twentieth-century poets to new subject matter and forms, expanding and deepening the American experiment in English-language poetry. 'The state with the prettiest name,' as Bishop dubbed Florida indelibly, is also a state of mind in which profusion and extravagance flourish, and it has found a proponent, midrashic and scholarly, in Ange Mlinko's commentary, equally ludic and intense. Like her poems, these essays are trellises for vines dense with blossoms, creating their own patterns by means of lightning transition, serendipity, resurrected etymologies, and other percipient or witty trouvailles--all rooted in rich, 'venereal soil,' in Stevens's term. The vines, the lines, the motifs of her poets interlace like rhymes in a mazy troubadour form, mazy and florabundant. At times one suspects the subject is not Floridian but American poetry itself.