I had never been one to follow society's "rules". My oldest friend was a Creole at a time when that simply wasn't done. Then, I made an even bolder decision by serving as a nurse for the Buffalo Soldiers during the Spanish-American War. By doing so, it was evident to all that I held little regard for the Jim Crow laws.My choice of working in that camp hospital put me in immediate danger, but after I gave my heart to one of the soldiers there, I found myself caught in the racial violence besieging the area.When the consequences of my past decisions followed me home, I had no choice but to cling to my faith and pray that I find the path I was meant to travel.

    Love, loss, and addiction entwine in this moving debut collection. Emily Arnason Casey employs the lyric imagination to probe memory and the ever-shifting lens of time as she seeks to make sense of the disease that haunts her maternal family tree and the alchemy of loss and longing.The lakes of her childhood in Minnesota form the interior landscape of this book, a kind of watery nostalgia for something just beyond her reach. "I know this feeling," she writes. "We travel along the surface of time and then suddenly the layers give way and we are in another year, another body, another place."Casey's willingness to honestly examine the past and present with contemplative lyricism offers fresh perspective and new understanding. In electric moments that are utterly relatable, she weaves a tale of love and commitment to the truth of her experience despite the incredible desire to keep alive a legacy of secrets. Like the mullein plant she invokes in the final essay, these essays form a kind of "guardian to the lost."

    The natural environment of Southern Appalachia, with habitats that span the Blue Ridge to the Cumberland Plateau, is one of the most biodiverse on earth. A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia--a hybrid literary and natural history anthology--showcases sixty of the many species indigenous to the region.Ecologically, culturally, and artistically, Southern Appalachia is rich in paradox and stereotype-defying complexity. Its species range from the iconic and inveterate--such as the speckled trout, pileated woodpecker, copperhead, and black bear--to the elusive and endangered--such as the American chestnut, Carolina gorge moss, chucky madtom, and lampshade spider. The anthology brings together art and science to help the reader experience this immense ecological wealth.Stunning images by seven Southern Appalachian artists and conversationally written natural history information complement contemporary poems from writers such as Ellen Bryant Voigt, Wendell Berry, Janisse Ray, Sean Hill, Rebecca Gayle Howell, Deborah A. Miranda, Ron Rash, and Mary Oliver. Their insights illuminate the wonders of the mountain South, fostering intimate connections. The guide is an invitation to get to know Appalachia in the broadest, most poetic sense.

    This lyric lore, which includes curious diagrams and collages of the botanical and the anatomical, contains hidden instructions to prepare girls for the hazards ahead. In retelling lore alongside other Grimm-style stories, the poet turns horror classics The Silence of the Lambs and Alien into macabre fairy tales in their own right. Herein lurks violence and decay, but also a wild, overgrown beauty. Mothers and fathers are as much a part of this treacherous landscape as the carnivorous flora and shape-shifting fauna—and their effects are just as devastating. Framing all of this within biblical language and motifs gives these fabulist poems an ominous sense of urgency. Catechesis is a hybrid collection of textual and visual poems that examine belief and obsession. It explores how beauty leads to danger and danger births another kind of beauty, in a cycle of creation and destruction.

    Exit Pastoral presents the queer South as a site of pastoral fabulation and charts the desiderata of a boy trying to fashion landscapes that love him back. The chapbook rests in the forgotten spaces of queer intimacy: parkways and bathroom stalls, swimming pools and orchards—the doubled geographies of abjection and desire.