“Harry Humes writes about forces within and beyond familiar, everyday things, forces which are unnameable except as one attends the very items which hide them. He uncovers as well a quiet humor in his world of coal miners, rare animals, their context of secret losses, the world of mink and sunflowers and the sensuous drift of time. From his deceptively simple Saxon diction he leads us into primary, unsettling complexity; he has learned to lift from his directness a fetching music, too. This is an unpretentiously probing, integral book ‘filled with spectacle and wilderness’ and ‘a few last things before it’s time to leave.’ ”
—Dabney Stuart

“In language that is like a cool splash of springwater, Humes re-creates a life lived close to, and sometimes in bitter contention with, nature. The Appalachia of these poems is pure, unsentimentalized, beautiful, demanding, and giving. And so are the poems.”
—Kelly Cherry