Appalachian Roots. Este artículo no está disponible.Appalachian Roots

I was born just shy of a Civil War battlefield and grew up barefoot on a small farm in southeastern Tennessee. That is the credential that matters here.

During the Hawaiian missile scare of 2018, with what I believed were minutes left, I did not think about my degrees or my list of things not yet done. I thought about faces. The people who had loved me and whom I had loved. The places that had shaped me before I was old enough to know I was being shaped. And I knew, with a steadiness that surprised me, whose face I would see next.

This collection came from that reckoning.

Appalachian Roots moves through four sections — The Land Speaks, What Is Inherited, Becoming, Returning Home — and does what memory does: it reaches back past itself, into ancestors never met but somehow known, into family, into the people who chose to stay and the ones who chose to show up. One voice carries these poems. Many lives move through it.

Some of these poems are serious. Some are not. Wordsworth called poetry emotion recollected in tranquility. That's close. I'd say it's the heart bled out onto the page — held out to a stranger in the hope that somewhere in it, they find themselves.

Each of us is unrepeatable, all the way down to our gut flora. The world is in want of good stories. I hope this one earns a place in yours.