Two Brown Dots explores what it means to be a racially ambiguous, multiethnic, Asian American woman growing up in Kentucky. In stark, honest poems, Quintos recounts the messiness and confusion of being a typical ‘90s kid—watching Dirty Dancing at sleepovers, borrowing eye shadow out of a friend’s caboodle, crushing on a boy wearing khaki shorts […]
Poetry
The title of this new volume of poetry by upfromsumdirt packs a lot of meaning and intention into a mere three words. It is dedicated to Emmett Till, and more recent Black victims of violence, and is entirely an urgent demand for social justice.
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.
An astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves—from National Book Critics Circle Award winner, National Book Award finalist and U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón.
Marianne Worthington divides Girl Singer into three distinct yet harmonious parts, cantillating local, familial, and personal histories across rural Appalachia.
This bilingual (Spanish and English) book of poems is about home and notions of home and different kinds of self-portraiture. Among the poems in the collection is a sequence on Albrecht Dürer’s self-portraits that meditates on how we see and interpret the world and how we fashion images of ourselves for others.
Crystal Wilkinson combines a deep love for her rural roots with a passion for language and storytelling in this compelling collection of poetry and prose about girlhood, racism, and political awakening, imbued with vivid imagery of growing up in Southern Appalachia.
A collection of poems written by a teacher who served in public schools for twenty-five years, Mama Tried (Broadstone Books) takes the reader on a journey through her experiences as an educator and as a mother.
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.”
When Frank X Walker's compelling collection of personal poems was first released in 2004, it told the story of the infamous Lewis and Clark expedition from the point of view of York, who was enslaved to Clark and became the first African American man to traverse the continent. The fictionalized poems in Buffalo Dance form […]
From the award-winning and critically acclaimed author of A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing comes a new book of narrative in verse that takes a personal and historical look at the experience of Black girlhood. In the American imagination the contrasts between visibility and invisibility for Black girlhood are glaring.