"This work is unlike any other, in its range of rich, conjuring imagery and its dexterity, its smart voice. Carroll-Hackett doesn’t spare us—but doesn’t save us—she draws a blueprint of power and class with her unflinching pivot: matter-of-fact and tender." —Jan Beatty

Posts tagged ‘Appalachian poets’

Monday Must Read! States of Mercy, A Novel by Ace Boggess

Ace Boggess is author of the novel A Song Without a Melody and four books of poetry: I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So, Ultra Deep Field, The Prisoners, and The Beautiful Girl Whose Wish Was Not Fulfilled. He earned degrees from Marshall University and the West Virginia University College of Law. His fiction appears in Notre Dame Review, Lumina, Belmont Story Review, Superstition Review, and other journals. He received a fellowship for fiction from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts and spent five years in a West Virginia prison. He lives in Charleston, West Virginia.

Buy States of Mercy Here! 

States of Mercy Boggess

Mercy Adams, the young existential heroine, follows a path of self-discovery through chaos at the turn of the millennium and beyond. Her friend Lucian Lang narrates the story of her struggle to overcome hurt in a world in transition. Violence, drug abuse, and a growing diversity of approaches to spirituality are the norm, setting up barriers to understanding and, ultimately, transformation. States of Mercy explores questions of identity and belief, but also friendship. How far can friends travel this road together before one goes where the other cannot follow? Mercy and Lucian intend to find out together, unless the mad world destroys them first.

 

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Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Creativity, fiction, Gratitude, healing, Love, Must Read Monday, Must Read Writers, One Love, publishing, Writing

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Monday Must Read! Drifting in Awe by Larry Thacker

Larry D. Thacker is a Kentuckian poet, writer, and artist now hailing from Johnson City, Tennessee with his wife, Karin, and their cat, Abraham Lincoln. A five year veteran of the US army and having served fifteen years in the realm of student services in higher education, he finally paid heed to the voices of adventurous reason and will soon complete his poetry and fiction MFA at West Virginia Wesleyan College. He earned his bachelor of history, master of education in counseling, and education specialist degree from Lincoln Memorial University, home of the Mountain Heritage Literary Festival. Besides Drifting in Awe, he is the author of Mountain Mysteries: The Mystic Traditions of Appalachia (2007), and the chapbooks Voice Hunting (2011) and Memory Train (2015). His poems have appeared in over a hundred journals and magazines.

Keep up with what’s happening at http://www.larrydthacker.com

and on Instagram at: thackalachia

Buy this beautiful book here!   

Also, keep an eye out for Larry’s forthcoming collection, Grave Robber Confessional, later this year, from one of my favorites, FutureCycle Press. 

Thacker

Praise for Drifting in Awe

The poems in this resonant book offer a strong, hands-on encounter with the world as it is, with the weather, geography, the trees, our fellow creatures. Attending to the muscular and physical realities of the local world, however, rightly leads these poems to the lesser-known and less-certain wonders of the metaphysical, to the apprehension, as far as the mind can reach, of a meaning beyond the limits of physical knowledge. What’s out there beyond the fog rising in a cove? What questions should we ask, only to voice them, knowing they have no ready answer? That strange little paradox is why we have poetry at all, and here is a fine book to prove that point, with elegance, and with elegant reserve.

—Maurice Manning

Larry Thacker writes of the natural world and what hovers on the edge of consciousness. Entities “seen in the corner of the eye” or “the sound of the sun” might manifest if one becomes still enough to see and hear. Drifting in Awe, gives us a manual for doing just that. In his first full length collection, Thacker invites us to be still and let that world come to us if we are brave enough. 

—Jane Hicks

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Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Books, Creativity, Must Read Monday, Must Read Writers, poetry, Writing

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Must Read Monday! Doug Van Gundy: A Life Above Water

 

VanGundyThis week meet Doug Van Gundy, author of A Life Above Water. Doug teaches in both the BA and MFA writing programs at West Virginia Wesleyan College. His poems, essays and reviews have appeared in The Oxford American, Poems & Plays, Ecotone, Appalachian Heritage, Waccamaw and Poetry Salzburg Review. He is currently co-editing an anthology of contemporary writing from West Virginia for WVU Press and working on his second book of poems, tentatively titled, No Dog Inside.

Doug has also has been an elephant keeper, a copywriter, a country radio disk jockey, a letterpress operator, a television game show winner, and is a multi-talented musician. He’s an incredible old-time fiddler (along with playing a kajillion other instruments), performing with Paul Gartner in the duo Born Old.

Buy Doug’s beautiful book!

http://redhen.org/book/?uuid=F6650841-8509-33C3-0C69-129FD872CC95

Praise for A Life Above Water

Doug Van Gundy s poems are pitch-perfect and packed with indelible images, each as striking and distinct as a hawk in a clear blue sky above one of his beloved mountains. This poet has a genius for quick characterization, too; I love his crow-eyed bachelor men/who lived on the hillside and smelled/of fried potatoes and machine oil, for instance. Some of these poems are like whole novels. Doug Van Gundy has captured a culture in this book. –Lee Smith

More about Doug, poetry and music, at his website

http://www.dougvangundy.com/

Learn More About Doug’s Music and Born Old

https://www.facebook.com/bornoldband

http://www.countysales.com/products.php?product=DOUG-VAN-GUNDY-%26-PAUL-GARTNER-%27Born-Old%27

Read More from Doug Online

http://www.connotationpress.com/featured-guest-editor/poetry-october-2009/137-doug-van-gundy-poetry

http://www.storysouth.com/poetry/2008/06/west_virginia_vs_extractive_in.html

http://www.fishousepoems.org/keeper/

http://appalachianheritage.net/author/dougvangundy/

http://www.datelinewheeling.com/blog/2015/10/22/music-and-muse-mountaineer-poet-says-the-two-meld-perfectly

Hear Doug Read

https://soundcloud.com/storyweb/doug-van-gundy-a-beautiful-jar-of-jelly

And Play!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeOj7nLF3_Y

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnKAOWSO410

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZisqgmidCc

 

 

Happy Reading!

xo

Mary

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Creativity, Family, Gratitude, Love, Music, Must Read Monday, Must Read Writers, One Love, poetry, Writing

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