Creekwater Mansions

This debut collection of poems by Ian Hall illuminates daily life for a family and community in eastern Kentucky, all the while singing with verbal delights.

Creekwater Mansions documents the intimacy of duress. A son puffs cigarette smoke down his grandad's throat because the old man is too feeble to draw breath; retired draft horses learn to dance; the land manager's hired muscle flaunts an axe-handle; a grieving family uses a coffin as a card table; schoolboys siphon gin out of shag carpet just to catch a high. These are the variations of affection and kinship, so informed by and inextricable from the macabre tedium that abides in the back pews, dialysis clinics, and County-Line Liquors of daily life in Eastern Kentucky.

While these poems are frequently ordered around grisly attitudes and occurrences, moods of indolent provincialism, and the evermore-contagious disease of despair, these are at their core love poems. Hall writes, "Those are my people. I want nothing more than to esteem them and to show outsiders that even gruesomely human moments stripped of any decoration still have the heft and horsepower to be transcendent."