Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place

Praise for Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place

Praise for Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place “‘I will guide you,’ bell hooks promises, and delivers, in her remarkable collection, Appalachian Elegy. In meditations intimate and clear, with ‘radical grace,’ she negotiates ‘beauty and danger,’ the animal and human worlds, the pain of history, the dead and the living. With wisdom and courage, she moves through lamentation to resurrection, and the worlds she unearths are an ‘avalanche of splendor.’” —Paula Bohince, author of The Children and Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods “Hush arbors were safe places in the deep woods where slaves could commune with each other to lift their choral voices to the heavens as they tarried for freedom. bell hooks comes from a people who deeply connected with this country’s ‘backwoods’ and hills in Kentucky and decided to stead in these spaces. Tending and tilling the land that afforded them independence and the freedom to unmask in isolation. They were ‘renegades and rebels’ who didn’t seek to civilize Kentucky’s wilds, instead developing a besidedness with the land that informs bell hooks’s sense of self and belonging. This collection of poems is a departure for the important polemicist, a place where she is able to roam her boundless imagination using her emotional intelligence as her primary compass . Praise songs for her ancestors sit beside her meditations on turtles. Here is a rare glance into the soul of our beloved, prolific, yet private bell hooks, who took her mother’s surname as her nom de plume. Here she returns to her mother’s woods, to the ‘wilderness within.’” —dream hampton, journalist and filmmaker “The collection reflects aesthetic and linguistic choices based on the thinking and feeling of someone who has made important contributions to contemporary thought and who thinks and feels deeply about what Kentucky—as ‘here’ and home—means to her.” —Edwina Pendarvis, Professor Emeritus at Marshall University and author of Like the Mountains of China Praise for Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place, continued “bell hooks has crafted a lyrical, sweeping panorama, deftly conjuring the tangled root and insistent steam of Appalachia. In these lean, melodic poems, she holds the land close; it’s achingly apparent how essential these memories are to the raw, unleashed spirit that typifies her body of work. These communiqués, from an elsewhere the mind visits too rarely , reside in that constantly shifting space between melancholy and celebration . No one but bell hooks could have taken us there.” —Patricia Smith, four-time National Poetry Slam individual champion Appalachian Elegy ...