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Praise for
Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place
    â€œâ€˜I will guide you,’ bell hooks promises, and delivers, in her remarkable collection, Appalachian Elegy. In meditations intimate and clear, with ‘radical grace,’ she negotiates ‘beauty and danger,’ the animal and human worlds, the pain of history, the dead and the living. With wisdom and courage, she moves through lamentation to resurrection, and the worlds she unearths are an ‘avalanche of splendor.’”
    â€”Paula Bohince, author of
The Children
and
Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods
    â€œHush arbors were safe places in the deep woods where slaves could commune with each other to lift their choral voices to the heavens as they tarried for freedom. bell hooks comes from a people who deeply connected with this country’s ‘backwoods’ and hills in Kentucky and decided to stead in these spaces. Tending and tilling the land that afforded them independence and the freedom to unmask in isolation. They were ‘renegades and rebels’ who didn’t seek to civilize Kentucky’s wilds, instead developing a besidedness with the land that informs bell hooks’s sense of self and belonging. This collection of poems is a departure for the important polemicist, a place where she is able to roam her boundless imagination using her emotional intelligence as her primary compass. Praise songs for her ancestors sit beside her meditations on turtles. Here is a rare glance into the soul of our beloved, prolific, yet private bell hooks, who took her mother’s surname as her nom de plume. Here she returns to her mother’s woods, to the ‘wilderness within.’”
    â€”dream hampton, journalist and filmmaker
    â€œThe collection reflects aesthetic and linguistic choices based on the thinking and feeling of someone who has made important contributions to contemporary thought and who thinks and feels deeply about what Kentucky—as ‘here’ and home—means to her.”
    â€”Edwina Pendarvis, Professor Emeritus at Marshall University and author of
Like the Mountains of China
    â€œbell hooks has crafted a lyrical, sweeping panorama, deftly conjuring the tangled root and insistent steam of Appalachia. In these lean, melodic poems, she holds the land close; it’s achingly apparent how essential these memories are to the raw, unleashed spirit that typifies her body of work. These communiqués, from an elsewhere the mind visits too rarely, reside in that constantly shifting space between melancholy and celebration. No one but bell hooks could have taken us there.”
    â€”Patricia Smith, four-time National Poetry Slam individual champion

Appalachian Elegy

Appalachian Elegy

Poetry and Place
bell hooks

Copyright © 2012 by Gloria Jean Watkins (bell hooks)
    Published by the University Press of Kentucky
    Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth,
    serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre
    College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University,
    The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College,
    Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University,
    Morehead State University, Murray State University,
    Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University,
    University of Kentucky, University of Louisville,
    and Western Kentucky University.
    All rights reserved.
    Editorial and Sales Offi ces
: The University Press of Kentucky
    663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008
    www.kentuckypress.com
    16 15 14 13 12        5 4 3 2 1
    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
    hooks, bell.
    Appalachian elegy : poetry and place / bell hooks.
    p. cm.
    Includes index.
    ISBN 978-0-8131-3669-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8131-3670-7 (pdf) —
    ISBN 978-0-8131-4076-6 (epub)
    1. hooks, bell—Childhood and youth—Poetry. 2. Appalachian Region—
    Poetry. 3. Kentucky—Poetry. I. Title.
    PS3608.O594A84