"Lit-up and melancholy, these poems inhabit and reanimate the old songs, the ballads and fiddle tunes of the original mountain music that has no beginning and shows no sign of ending soon. Murder ballads, roaming, and redemption are all here with pining refrain. But then the book opens like a dogwood blossom to capture the music of childhood and family, as if a life of learning and wonder, love and loss is bounded by song. And so it is. These poems hit the ear like rain on a tin roof and summon a world that's heartfelt and true, because the things of that world, from the human music right down to the birds, belong to each other and to the wondrous world itself." -- Maurice Manning, author of Railsplitter and One Man's Dark

" The Girl Singer is a praise song, love song, rage song, ballad, recitative, and lament for early country music singers costumed, renamed, packaged, and sold; for the poet's mother, who filmed a teenage Dolly Parton singing in a gas station parking lot; the poet's father, caught in paralysis and a fading mind; for the musicians -- country and soul -- who were the soundtrack of her growing up; and for the glory of being in the audience at the Ryman when Bobby Bare kissed Marty Stuart. Worthington reclaims these beloveds, along with her "maternal people" and her grandmothers, with whom she is "encircled now, all// living together." She restores her parents to their beginning -- and hers -- as we go with them to the Opry on their honeymoon. Through multiple forms -- fixed and invented -- she renders these moments. And by turns her singing words dazzle and cleave our hearts." -- George Ella Lyon, former Kentucky Poet Laureate (2015-2016) and author of Back to the Light

"Patsy Cline, The Carter Sisters, Hazel Dickens, the long-dead Laura Foster -- Marianne Worthington conjures them all in a stunning assemblage of voices ranging from legendary to lost, silenced and misunderstood. The result is resonant and resplendent. Sketch a map that we can sing, Worthington writes in her final poem, and that's precisely what she's managed in this pitch-perfect collection. " -- Sonja Livingston, author of The Virgin of Prince Street and Ghostbread

"In this lively and indelible collection, where the dead stay dancing and the crows are full of quarrel, where hands might be covered in blood or guitar calluses, Marianne Worthington's hypnotic rhythms and dazzling images transport us to barn dances, the Ryman, kitchen tables, backyard bird feeders, Knoxville living rooms lit by the TV glow. Reverent of the thin places and defiant in their joy, these poems strum and pluck, vibrate and ring. The voice of The Girl Singer is high, clear, and true." -- Erin Keane, editor in chief of Salon.com