In The Tillable Land, Melva Sue Priddy’s poetry tells the story of a girlhood made of both land and family in midcentury Kentucky. There is a growing up and a coming of age in these poems. Part memoir-in-verse, part praise song, The Tillable Land—through the story of one woman’s hard-won Kentucky life and the physical and emotional work of growing up close to the land in a man’s world—reminds us that it is possible to be both a farmer and a woman and that healing can be found in both the earth and the power of Mother Nature within us. “Priddy makes brilliant use of the repetitive, braiding form of the villanelle to convey the relentless cycles of farm work. But somehow, amid this punishing labor, ‘another god spoke with [her] . . . and words songed through [her] veins’. She never let go of that singing, and now she offers it to us.” (Quoted material: George Ella Lyon)
