Kari Gunter-Seymour's new collection, A Place So Deep Inside America It Can't Be Seen, is a timeless array of poems that invites the reader to traverse memories that feel as sacred as scripture. The collection is stunning in its ability to elevate memory and hold singular experiences aloft for perusal. In concert, the poems read like a carefully preserved palimpsest, layered cohesively, suggesting there's always more where that came from. Not a single poem is negligible. This is an airtight intersection of family and kinship, and through Gunter-Seymour's meticulous model, we are asked to consider what we, too, have inherited from the land as much as from our people, and how many, many ways, "Everything alive aches for more." - Bianca X, Affrilachian Poet, Author of Black Mermaid

Generations pass and still we toil/scratch at scars, lose track of the path home" Kari Gunter-Seymour writes in her poignant new collection A Place So Deep Inside America It Can't Be Seen . These searing poems, however, have no trouble tracing the path to the ground of the poet's making-her childhood home-and to her mother and father, unforgettable, as flesh, ghost and memory. These poems feel necessary and real and stark as the Appalachian Mountains themselves. - Rita Sims Quillen, author of Wayland and The Mad Farmer's Wife

In A Place So Deep Inside America It Can't Be Seen, Kari Gunter-Seymour writes with clear, evocative language as she weaves stories of her people, especially the strong women in her life who are portrayed honestly and with compassion. She takes us along on an intergenerational journey through roles as daughter, granddaughter, mother, grandmother, all closely connected to those who came before and those yet to return home. These vivid poems, deeply rooted in place and nature, are filled with images of a life spent in northern Appalachia. Gunter-Seymour writes of planting by the signs and the music of Hank and Dolly, but moves on to contemporary themes like border walls and legacies of war. In these poems, the past meshes with the present, and provides solid footing to face the future. - Jayne Moore Waldrop, author of Retracing My Step

Advance Appreciations

Mothers abound in Kari Gunter-Seymour's poetry collection, A Place So Deep Inside America It Can't Be Seen. In this place, the storied soil of Ohio, mothers keen into dark morning, "surviving passages so narrow/they felt like birth canals," tightrope mothers, aching and penniless mothers, mothers who "go thin" with sleep and drugs. Life has its dire way with us. It also makes us lift our skirts with "shilly-shally... clap and tweedle... waggery and grit." Gunter-Seymour's soaring poems are testaments to the long lost and the dearly held, reminding us: "In some languages to be carried /is the same as to fly." -Linda Parsons, author of Candescent and This Shaky Earth

I know with all my knowing others are going to talk about A Place So Deep Inside America It Can't Be Seen as a fine example of Appalachian writing, and they would be correct, but what I read in this body of work makes me believe in a raw, uncontainable power, the kind that changes and shapes entire mountain ranges, that can fill black holes, that turns flames back onto what is already burned saying "This far, no farther." This work represents one woman against a world-class destructive force and she will not be silenced. Such power is rarely found. - Stellasue Lee, Editor Emerita, Rattle, author of Queen of Jacks, New and Selected Poems