 The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South
University of Georgia Press, 2007
Nikky Finney
The South: to render all that it means to an African American takes someone with acutely tuned senses, someone with a patience, a passion even, for the region's history and contradictions. It takes a poet. In this new anthology, the first of its kind, more than one hundred contemporary black poets laugh at and cry about, pray for and curse, flee and return to--the South. |
 Field Work: Modern Poems from Eastern Forests
University Press of Kentucky, 2008
Erik Reece
While writing his book, Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness, Erik Reece spent a great deal of time studying strip mining and its effect on the environment and surrounding communities. After a year of exploring the ugliness of a rapidly disappearing landscape, Reece felt a strong need to celebrate the wonder the Eastern broadleaf forests still have to offer. The result is a collection of poems by individuals who share Thoreau’s belief that the natural world is “an unroofed church, a place of reverence.” Field Work: Modern Poems from Eastern Forests seeks an answer to Frost’s question, “What to make of a diminished thing?” by contemplating work from some of the twentieth century’s greatest nature poets. |
 The Memory Keeper's Daughter
New York: Viking, 2005.
Kim Edwards
This stunning novel begins on a winter night in 1964, when a blizzard forces Dr. David Henry to deliver his own twins.
His son, born first, is perfectly healthy, but the doctor immediately recognizes that his daughter has Down syndrome. For motives he tells himself are good, he makes a split-second decision that will haunt all their lives forever. He asks his nurse, Caroline, to take the baby away to an institution. Instead, she disappears into another city to raise the child as her own. Compulsively readable and deeply moving, The Memory Keeper's Daughter is a brilliantly crafted story of parallel lives, familial secrets, and the redemptive power of love.
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 An Atomic Romance
Random House, 2005.
Bobbie Ann Mason
This provocative, rollicking story is the much-anticipated new novel–the first in over a decade–from acclaimed author Bobbie Ann Mason. In An Atomic Romance we meet Reed Futrell, a sexy, thoughtful hero who grapples with radioactive contamination, a midlife crisis, and string theory–all while falling in love. |
 Nancy Culpepper
Random House, 2006.
Bobbie Ann Mason
Bestselling author Bobbie Ann Mason’s prizewinning Nancy Culpepper chronicles have appeared in The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, The Southern Review, and other distinguished literary anthologies. She has compiled these stories into one definitive collection, which includes the novella Spence + Lila, two new, never-before-published stories, and one Pushcart Prize winner. Heartfelt and thought-provoking, Nancy Culpepper is a poignant depiction of change and growth in a modern-day heroine. |
 The World is Round
InnerLight Publishing, 2003.
Nikky Finney
The World Is Round focuses on the intimacy of life. The intimacy of family. The intimacy of struggle. The intimacy of community. The intimacy of sensuality. The intimacy of hatred. The intimacy of hunger. In this collection of poems I continue to chart my belief that human beings can be better than we are. In this book I am a chorus of monks. I am an elephant. Sweetgrasss. The confederate flag. My mother’s umbilical cord. I am a southern congressman’s retarded son. A Black woman’s grotesquely cut body. My father’s last cigarette. |
 The Secrets of a Fire King
W.W. Norton, 1997.
Kim Edwards
In each of these elegant and mesmerizing stories, Kim Edwards explores the lives of those who exist on the fringes of society--a fire-eater, an American and his Korean war bride, a juggler and a trapeze artist. Spanning several generations and transporting us to exotic locations in Europe, Asia, and America, this wise and exquisite story collection marks the debut of a gifted new voice in literature. |
 Lost Country
University of Massachusetts Press, 1993
Dan Howell
“The best poems in Lost Country bring an almost preternatural clarity of focus to the small, out of the way details, moments, and dimensions of collective and individual life that are everywhere around us but that nobody till now has thought to notice. The book’s most memorable poem, ‘The 4A Shuffle,’ is one of the most bizarre, yet deeply humane accounts of the Vietnam era that I have ever read.” – Alan Shapiro |
 Kinfolks: The Wilgus Stories
Gnomon Press, 1977.
Gurney Norman
This book brings together Norman's Wilgus stories that have appears in small magazines over a ten-year period. The stories explore the variety of relationships among members of an Eastern Kentucky family in the post-World War II years. Wilgus Collier is nine years old in the first story, and by the last, when in his twenties, we have witnessed the many rites of passage in growing up. The feeling and mood of the mountain region are present here, but Norman's sense of place is very much his own. Yet the mountain setting with its humor and fine madness does not limit these stories to their audience--for they range into intricacies of character, family situation, and American life that have wide appeal. |
 A Garden in Kentucky
Louisiana State University Press
Jane Gentry
In this collection Jane Gentry evokes, in images as haunting as the Kentucky landscape, a garden thriving with the flowers of memory, a physical world that reflects a realm of transcendence. In this garden, cosmic harmony reveals itself in the "ciphers" of roots and worms, in a piece of blue willow china-"a blaze of balance, of wholeness"-that survives a fire in which a lonely, tormented neighbor died. |
 Portrait of the Artist as a White Pig
Louisiana State University Press
Jane Gentry
These rich, lyrical poems, written by Jane Gentry over ten years, register the resonance between the poet’s inner being and the outer world’s everyday events. The juxtaposition of the ordinary and the beautiful, the paradox of the mundane and the artistic- whether in nature, in relationships, in memories, or in the body- are the hallmarks of her second collection. |
 Divine Right's Trip
The Dial Press
Gurney Norman
Gurney Norman’s novel is a free-spirited odyssey, the story of a young man named Divine Right making his way eastward across the country in day-glo painted VW bus named Urge in the company, most of the way, of his nonplussed girl friend Estelle. In Cincinnati Divine Right visits the remnants of his family- it is a warm, nostalgic reunion and impels him on, sans Estelle, to his abandoned home ground in Appalachia. There, amid tried and true neighbors, he finds a fulfilling base for his life and a new avocation in an ingenious exploitation of his natural resources. |
 Old Wounds, New Words: Poems from the Appalachian Poetry Project
The Jesse Stuart Foundation
Bob Henry Barber, George Ella Lyon, and Gurney Norman
We are told that the light seen when we look up at the stars in the nights sky started coming to us long ago, and that in some cases , the light just now arriving is from stars that have gone out, Doesn’t this notion suggest the better metaphor for Old Wounds, New Words? Although these poems, like light from stars, started coming to us years ago, they arrive just now. |
 Clear Springs
Random House
Bobbie Ann Mason
A multilayered narrative of three generations- Bobbie Ann Mason, her parents and grandparents- Clear Springs gracefully interlaces several different lives, decades, and locales, moving from the industrious life on a Kentucky farm to travels around the South with Mason as president of the Hilltoppers Fan Club. This book depicts the changes that have come to family, to women, and to heartland America in the twentieth century, as well as Bobbie Ann Mason herself. Her mother, especially, stands at the center of this book. Mason’s journey leads her to recognition of the drama and significance of her mother’s life and to a new understanding of heritage, place, and family roots. |
 In Country
Harper & Row Publishers
Bobbie Ann Mason
The book, which takes place in western Kentucky, concerns a teenage girl's questions about the war in Vietnam, where her father died and her uncle served. Unlike many serious works of literature, which generally avoid current events because they will soon be outdated, the novel has constant cultural references that were fresh when it was published in 1984. In addition to the timely cultural references, the characters that Mason presented also helped her gain broader audiences than many novelists enjoy. In Country, like most of Bobbie Ann Mason's works, succeeds in using the mundane aspects of modern life in a search for greater meaning. |
 Rice
Sister Vision: Black Women and Women of Colour Press
Nikky Finney
You are about to enter the enchanting world of Nikky Finney and her inspiring celebration of African American tradition and culture- all through her mastery of the simple word. This is a powerful collection of remarkable taste, honesty, and wisdom. Like the nourishing richness and purity of a grain of rice, every word satisfies-every phrase is a feast for the senses-every page makes you want more- RICE! |
 Heartwood
The University of Kentucky Press
Nikky Finney
Deep in the center of every tree, you’ll find the heartwood. The characters in this new book by poet Nikky Finney are the heartwood of their small Kentucky communities, You’ll meet Buck Jones and Mae Benner, whose anger has twisted them up inside, Arizona Scott and Queenie Sims, who can see the food in people and Trina Sims and Jenny Bryan, two young women who discover how much they are alike despite their different skin color. |
 On Wings Made of Gauze
Quill Publishers
Nikky Finney
This is Nikky Finney’s first collection of poems about the strength of the African American traditions. She provides poems, urgent and sure, daring in vision and craft, giving us little time to catch our break between her powerful communiqués. |