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Alone in the House of My Heart: Poems
Deeply rooted in respect and compassion for Appalachia and its people, these poems are both paeans to and dirges for past and present family, farmlands, factories, and coal. Kari Gunter-Seymour's second full-length collection resounds with candid, lyrical poems about Appalachia's social and geographical afflictions and affirmations. History, culture, and community shape the physical and personal landscapes of Gunter-Seymour's native southeastern Ohio soil, scarred by Big Coal and fracking, while food insecurity and Big Pharma leave their marks on the region's people. A musicality of language swaddles each poem in hope and a determination to endure. Alone in the House of My Heart offers what only art can: a series of thought-provoking images that evoke such a clear sense of place that it's familiar to anyone, regardless of where they call home.
Book Details
- Publisher: Swallow Press
- Publish Date: Sep 27th, 2022
- Pages: 104
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 8.30in - 5.40in - 0.30in - 0.31lb
- EAN: 9780804012430
- Categories: • Subjects & Themes - Places• American - General
About the Author
Kari Gunter-Seymour is the 2020-24 poet laureate of Ohio and the author of A Place So Deep inside America It Can't Be Seen. A ninth-generation Appalachian, she is the editor of I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing: Ohio's Appalachian Voices and the founder and host of the seasonal performance series Spoken & Heard. Her poems have appeared in the New York Times, New Ohio Review, One, Rattle, and numerous other publications.
Praise for this book
"The poems of Kari Gunter-Seymour's Alone in the House of My Heart are ragged with loss, yet sustained by all they take in through the senses, from Mother's 'cat-eye glasses, Pentecostal bun, ' whispering 'loud enough / for the soprano section to hear, ' to 'collards and heirloom tomatoes / strapped to stakes like sinners / begging the lash.' As the details accrue, they generate a place conjured by memory, the Appalachia of the speaker's upbringing, where she nested in the loft of the barn in the hay, 'spicy sweet, ' and where canned fruit cocktail is the ultimate delicacy. Still, it is a place sowed with the seeds of its own undoing--fracking, coal dust, addiction. Language itself is somehow larger even than the consciousness that creates it, more expansive than right and wrong, and 'free of the splintery / cold of our foolish selves, ' poetry, which here is synonymous with hard-won love."--Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets, winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry
"A breathtaking, artful set of poems on loss, family, place, and memory."--Kirkus (Starred review)
"We reckon that nine generations in Appalachia is long enough for a place to get in the bones of a family, and that kinheritance has marked Kari Gunter-Seymour with an intuitive feel for one of America's most isolated and peculiar regions."--Matt Sutherland, Foreword Reviews
"Kari Gunter-Seymour's talent shines like a diamond in this collection: solid, clear, sparkling."--Donna Meredith, Southern Literary Review
"These poems are delicately nuanced and so hard-edged, so unique, they can make you catch your breath."--Hephzibah Roskelly, World Literature Today