Moments of internal reckoning resonate in three recent poetry collections
…plant loom at the edges of these poems, but the abundance of the natural world provides the book’s emotional and spiritual power source. The smooth, polished voice of these poems…
Novelist Charles Dodd White discusses a pivotal year in his life as a writer
…a place “without parallel,” where “the grim and the beautiful were locked together and that the men and women were owned by it in equal measure.” How has Appalachia worked…
A young woman learns to fight for her adopted hometown in Moonrise Over New Jessup
Shaken by her sudden and unsettling departure from the rural Alabama farmland where she grew up, Alice Young stumbles off a bus to find herself in a place she’d never…
Sara Moore Wagner gives voice to the addict mother in Hillbilly Madonna
…and remorse. Ensnarement and escape. Everywhere in these poems, familial patterns assert themselves and make their influence known, evoking traumas both personal and generational. Photo: Christen Noel Kauffman Many of…
Rebecca Bernard explores dangerous territory in Our Sister Who Will Not Die
…protagonists who must navigate unusual social dynamics that place their choices under scrutiny — a widow who faces neighborhood criticism after the sudden death of her teenage son and a…
Ada Calhoun’s Also a Poet takes on entwined familial and artistic legacies
…also ghostwritten numerous bestsellers. Calhoun argues that to succeed at ghostwriting, “you must have boundless curiosity about the subject’s internal world, the way you would if they were your crush.”…
