This is as closely-knit an anthology as you are ever likely to see. It is as though a large, extended family were drawing on the same store of family stories, jokes, symbols, landscapes, animals, trees, language, and vernacular. How many snakes are in this book? How many foxes, possums? Fossils? And how very many coal mines? But it is not merely local references that unites these writers. There is a larger vision that ties these works together.

The speaker in Irene McKinney’s poems is most often alone, sitting at the side of a stream, or standing at her own chosen gravesite in the Appalachian mountains, and the meditations spoken out of this essential solitude are powerfully clear, witty, and wide-ranging in content and tone. The center sequence of poems in the Emily Dickinson persona explores and magnifies that great and enigmatic figure.
The poems are firmly grounded in concern for the ways in which the elemental powers are at work in the earth and in us: on the surface of our lives, and deeper in the underworld of the coalmines. In McKinney’s poems, the human world is never seen as separate from the natural one.

This fifth collection of poetry from West Virginia's poet laureate and author of Six O'Clock Mine Report is an extraordinary set of poems which reflects the complexity, the magnanimity, and the resilience of the human spirit. McKinney writes with candor, precision, and compassion; most importantly, though, her poems are accessible to all types of readers.