Poetry. To what degree do the Civil War in ancient Rome and the civil rights struggle in the United States resonate in our present moment of clashing public interests and disparities of race and class? In Limbs of the Apple Tree Never Die, his first book, Joel Felix grafts Lucan's Civil War to Virgil's Georgics to yield marvels of Tennessee drive- throughs, Selma, Montgomery, and Chicago. "To utilize the earth / choice apples must be found, / named, and securely lashed / to the forest drained of accident."