Appalachian Roots

A poet born in the shadow of a Civil War battlefield and raised barefoot on a small farm in southeastern Tennessee turns her attention to the country that made her - its ridge roads and inherited silences, its seasons and its labor, its dead and its living, its blood kin and chosen family alike.

Appalachian Roots: Poems of Mountain, Memory, and Home moves through four sections - The Land Speaks, What Is Inherited, Becoming, Returning Home - and does what memory does: it reaches back past itself. Into the ancestors never met but were somehow known, and into the land itself.

These are not poems of nostalgia. The voices that move through this collection are many, though the hand that holds them is one: precise, restrained, and shaped by a literary inheritance that runs from the Romantic tradition through the American regionalists, from Wordsworth's faith in natural observation to Frost's darkness beneath the pastoral.

The poems attend to ordinary things: the labor of hands, the faithfulness of seasons, the particular silence between people who love each other without ceremony. Rooted in the literary tradition of American regional poetry and written with the formal precision of a poet trained in both classical inheritance and the textures of physical labor, Appalachian Roots offers what the best place-based poetry always has - the particular rendered large enough to hold the universal.

For readers of Appalachian literature, Southern poetry, and the literature of home, memory, and belonging.