Books
Hopkinsville
A memoir in prose poetry, Hopkinsville represents the pinnacle of T. Crunk's skill as a poet, as well as a prose writer. An ode to a place and its people and their shared past, every page both moves and informs the reader. "Hopkinsville is not so much a personal memoir as it is an evocation of place during the author's childhood and ascent to adulthood, an excavation of memory to recreate a particular place that in some magical way becomes every small town. The author works through a lens, not a mirror. One can almost reconstruct the core of a community, building by building, event by event, whether it be a church social, a first meeting of long-lost siblings, or the wonder of fireworks at the county fair. It is a walking tour to a time and place seen through the illuminating lens of a poet who renders lives in ways reminiscent of James Agee's classic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a portrait that is thoroughly alive and moving."—Richard Taylor
Fathers
"True to his title, there are many fathers (along with a few prominent women) celebrated here, foremost his own father Joe Howard "Buzz" Taylor, as well as ancestors like Reuben Taylor, first of his Kentucky line, surrogate fathers including his Uncle Louis and best friend David Orr, and his son, now a father himself, continuing the generational saga. But recalling that the child is father of the man, the chief reason to welcome this book is for the insights it affords into Taylor's early life story, including nostalgic accounts of his childhood in and around Louisville, Kentucky. Taylor says this may be as close to an autobiography as he is apt to write, which is all the more reason to cherish these sketches from the life of a true Kentucky literary treasure."—Larry W. Moore
Homegoing
Homegoing by Toni Ann Johnson follows a middle-aged African-American woman facing loss as she returns to her conservative white hometown. This fearless book tackles issues such as race, isolation, childhood trauma, abandonment and ultimately healing. Homegoing won the Accents Publishing Inaugural Novella Contest. "Toni Ann Johnson has in Homegoing harnessed the unique power and grace of the novella. There's not a wasted word in this cinematically told, immediately engaging story, and yet the form affords her the length to develop characters whose deeply felt humanity makes them memorable."—Stuart Dybek, MacArthur Fellow and author of The Coast of Chicago, a New York Times Notable Book
Childhood
"These eloquent, edgy poems write of youth and parenting in powerful ways. They also go well beyond that, in addressing childhood as revelation: not just the temporal state we all go through, but the crisis of wonder our own children produce in us. Any reader who picks up this book can draw closer to that wonder and share in it again through this lyrical, moving work."—Eavan Boland, Professor of English, Stanford University and Member, Irish Academy of Letters
A Brief Natural History of an American Girl
Winner of the Editor's Choice award in the Accents 2012 Poetry Chapbook Contest. "In A Brief Natural History of an American Girl, Sarah Freligh pulls you into the car of a 1950's girlhood and you stay, compelled by the journey through sexual awakening and into womanhood. It's a difficult story. The narrator loses a lot—she gives kisses to the boss at Donut Delite, her virginity to a boy in a cornfield, her body to men she knows, or doesn't. She gives away a baby. She buries her mother. And hope, how 'easy to give her away.' And yet not quite. Through the accumulation of experience, through the ability to look clearly and name what she sees, Freligh insists on possibility. The poems draw our attention, then elicit a shiver of recognition. This is what one girlhood looks like; this is what human experience looks like. The journey is not over, she reminds us. You 'are not there yet.' - Wendy Mnookin, Author of The Moon Makes Its Own Plea. Limited availability. Please contact accents.publishing@gmail.com before ordering this book.