Pottery Town Blues: Short Stories

Karen Kotrba

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Do you recommend this book?

Yes!

The short stories in Karen Kotrba's collection Pottery Town Blues take readers into the lives of characters who exist at the intersection of Appalachia and the Rust Belt, people who survive on their own wits and wisdoms. Each selection offers the intimacy of living rooms and kitchens to which we are made privy to by the narrators. Kotrba knows, respects, and values these people and relates their collective episodes with empathy and humor so that their stories resonate and remain with us.

Robert Miltner, author of And Your Bird Can Sing and Ohio Apertures

Book Details

Publisher: Bottom Dog Press
Publish Date: Mar 9th, 2022
Pages: 130
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 8.50in - 5.50in - 0.30in - 0.38lb
EAN: 9781947504325
Categories: • Friendship• Cultural Heritage

About the Author

Kotrba, Karen: - Karen Kotrba was raised in Columbiana County, Ohio and taught composition at Baldwin-Wallace University, Youngstown State University, and Kent State University in East Liverpool. A graduate of the Northeast Ohio MFA program, she is the recipient of an Ohio Arts Council grant for individual excellence in fiction writing. Her poetic sequence about the midwives of the Frontier Nursing Service, She Who is Like a Mare, was also published by Bottom Dog Press.

Praise for this book

Come meet the people of East Liverpool, Ohio, where life might sometimes seem small and antiquated, but in Karen Kotrba's assured hands, the internal lives of its inhabitants are revealed to be to be as large as entire worlds. The small town, blue collar lives that take focus in this collection of tenderly and smartly written stories tell the story of the passed over and left behind places in our contemporary American landscape.

--Christopher Barzak, author of One for Sorrow and Wonders of the Invisible World

In the Appalachian Ohio River town of East Liverpool, people struggle to make and remake their lives. Old and young, they find success and loss in mythic imagination and everydayness. Karen Kotrba's interwoven short stories share human aspirations and actions with insight, humor, and compassion.

These citizens of Pottery Town, which someone wryly names Poverty Town, make full accountings of themselves through observation and interactions at a parade, a bank, in homes, apart¬ments, streets, stores, and cafés. Each story bubbles with history and place, sight, sound, and taste. Each creates a cinematic, richly detailed scene. The author leads us along store aisles, blind alleys, and misdirections to unexpected, yet satisfying conclusions. Henry David Thoreau's adage, found printed on a small pack of sugar, may say it best: "There is no remedy for love but to love more." Kotrba treats us to this. --Kathleen S. Burgess