bell hooks is the author of more than thirty books, including Ain't I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism, named by Publishers Weekly as one of the twenty most influential women's books of the last twenty years.
"Her elegy does not signal a final ending, but is rather only one
part of the process of renewal and rebirth.The koan-like rhythm of
hooks' elegy tells us that even in loss there is hope and evidence
of rebirth. She comes home, finding death and destruction, yet
there is evidence of a cyclical process in the wildness of nature."
-- Brandy Renee McCann blog
" Appalachian Elegy has the heft and expressiveness of a unified
book; it is not merely a collection of poems, but a book of poems
that accumulates meaning and pathos, wisdom and grief, as it
proceeds...That is a quality I desire in all poetry, and
Appalachian Elegy supplies it with a kind of incantation and dance
that I find deeply satisfying." -- Maurice Manning, finalist for
the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and winner of the 2000 Yale Younger Poets
award
"'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, the worlds she unearths an 'avalanche
of splendor.'" -- Paula Bohince, author of The Children an d Edge
of Bayonet Woods
"bell hook's poems grab us with an impatient sense of urgency to be
active participants in environmentalism and sustainability in the
Kentucky hills. It's a slim volume to which you may return often."
-- Rita Kohn, NUVO
"bell 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 communiques, 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." -- Patricia Smith, four-time
National Poetry Slam individual champion
"bell hooks is one of our most important dissidents. Here she
radically reinvisions the history of Kentucky, lowering a plumb
line of stark and insistent language into the depths of Appalachia.
Her poetry seeks to unearth suppressed communities, to recover a
vital sensibility, 'until history/rewritten resurrected/returns to
its rightful owners.' hooks forces us to hear her 'fierce, deep
grief' for, and attachment to, Appalachia; if we listen we will be
the richer for it." -- Naomi Wallace, Obie-award-winning playwright
and winner of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize
"hooks' distilled lyrics possess the weight of stones in a
foundation and logs in a cabin even as they sing and soar." --
Booklist
"Famous as an outspoken and astute cultural critic, bell hooks is
one of this generation's best-known intellectuals. In Appalachian
Elegy, she turns her sensibilities and creativity to poetry about
Kentucky, her home state. She dispenses with punctuation and
capitaliztion in aesthetic choices that argue for naturalness,
community, and openness to wonder." -- Now and Then; The
Appalachian Magazine
"Hush 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' 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.'" --
dream hampton, writer and filmmaker
"In these meditations -- bold, significant and large -- [hooks]
lifts us into a world where the land shapes feeling and wounds us
into the compressed grace of an appreciation for that land's
history. Appalachian Elegy is above all, a meditation on time and
place as experienced on a fragile earth, and, as such a
mediatation, it teaches us how to appreciate our responsibility to
our origins no matter where we come from." -- Sonja James,
Martinsburg Journal (WV)
"Powerful and clear, the book celebrates the area while
simultaneously mourning its ongoing losses." -- Shana Raley-Lusk,
At Home Tennessee
"Readers who know and love bell hooks will discover the source of
her strength. New readers will find a unique voice and the
universal strength of our natural world. All of us will find the
wild within ourselves." -- Gloria Steinem
"The 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."
-- Edwina Pendarvis, Professor Emeritus at Marshall University and
author of Like the Mountains of China
"The fact that Appalachian Elegy is as clear and spare and elegant
as the images and ideas hooks depicts reveals that her verse also
offers anhommage to craft, creativity and hope. Appalachian Elegy
radiates energy, empathy and intelligence." -- Linda Elisabeth
Beattie, Louisville writer and reviewer, chairs Spalding
University's Adult Accelerated Program
"Through her poetry, hooks entreats readers to remember and mourn
Kentuckians whom history has forgotten and gives a voice to the
voiceless rural African Americans of the region." -- Broadway
World
"Throughout, the poems rely on the energy of the short line and
expressive, simple adjectives, frrequently colors. They hum with
the melancholy of lamentation for what is lost, not merely in the
Kentucky hills, but also the loss of the ancient and undisturbed
all over the world." -- Mary Ellen Miller, professor of English,
Western Kentucky University
"Winner of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association's
Best Poetry Award for 2013" --
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