Heartbreak Tree is a poetic exploration of the intersection of gender and place in Appalachia. “There is a road, but the road is still inside you,” the mature Hansel tells the girl she was, encouraging her: “You are trying. Remember.” This book does the work of that remembering, honoring the responsibility of the poet to speak the forbidden stories of her own and other women’s lives. Linda Parsons says, “Pauletta Hansel’s Heartbreak Tree is the breakout work of a lifetime, a work of breaking silences and ancestral truth telling, of weighing that ‘box of darkness. in heart and hand like the pound of flesh it extracted—and finding it a strange gift of hard growth, harder knowledge and wisdom, and perhaps most importantly, self-forgiveness.”
