Books
Awkward Scrapes
Honeysuckle Season
Smoke
Labor: The Testimony of Ted Gall
Fathers
Cheeseburgers
Snow Falling on Water
Under the Seal
Painted Daydreams
Bee-coursing Box
Awkward Scrapes
Awkward Scrapes is a collection of poems that celebrates love, family, fatherhood, and the natural world while confronting grief, violence, memory, and healing. Rooted in Appalachia and Kentucky landscapes, Eric Scott Sutherland's lyrical, music-infused poems seek beauty, tenderness, and hope amid the awkward scrapes of being human. "The poems in Awkward Scrapes are the best kinds of love songs, never sentimental and always powerful. They are meditations on romantic love, on the profound connections we have with our children and the natural world, even on life itself. This book is a celebration of all that makes us human: the awfulness and the beauty, sometimes tangled. Sutherland is one of my favorite poets and I loved every carefully chosen yet organic word."—Silas House
Honeysuckle Season
Unfolding over a single day, Honeysuckle Season tells the story of a circus van travelling through Hazard, Kentucky careens off the road, smashing into a line of parked cars, killing a local basketball star. In Honeysuckle Season, twelve different narrators offer their take on that event and its aftermath, each story complimenting, deepening, and undermining the stories that came before. "Willie Davis has crafted an exquisite and engrossing collection of linked stories set in Hazard, Kentucky. These characters are wonderfully well-drawn. Flawed and funny, odd and wounded, striving and defeated, we get to know them well enough to root for them as individuals and as people who care for each other more than they realize. Readers will be moved, entertained, and delighted by the depth of love evoked for the characters and the place they live. It's a remarkable read."—Toni Ann Johnson
Smoke
After a lifetime of writing, poet, writer, journalist, photographer and podcaster Kevin Nance publishes a full-length collection of longer poems. Smoke is an immersive and evocative, celebratory and heartbreaking journey towards a life of authenticity, personal values and hard-earned freedom. "Kevin Nance's Smoke is a major literary achievement, from a voice distinctly Southern and at the same time universal in its themes of longing, memory, and love for the created world in all its manifestations. Such a delight to read poems from a fellow farm boy! I hear echoes of W. H. Auden and Maurice Manning, another great Kentucky poet. Nance's poems are tender, poignant, elegiac, and at the same time as invigorating as any honest engagement with the past—the real past, the authentic past—should be."—Fenton Johnson
Labor: The Testimony of Ted Gall
An extended poem in linked sections, in the voice of coal miner and activist Ted Gall, LABOR weaves one man's personal history into the history of work and justice in America. "In Labor, Woloch pulls a voice from the archives—that of Ted Gall, a miner and union organizer in Western Pennsylvania during the first half of the twentieth century. This poem, composed almost entirely in words written by Gall himself, gives a first-hand account of what it was like in the mines, in the unions, and in the spirits of the working poor, 'lifting their voices like trumpets' to sound what is somehow both historical and timely. This is an important contribution to Appalachian docupoetics and cross-racial labor solidarity. Woloch is a rescuer of language, a poet who knows where to dig up truths."—Joy Priest
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
Cheeseburgers
Packed with humor and memorable characters, Cheeseburgers, the fiction debut of Kentucky-based writer Dean Crawford, is a delightful love story set in the American Wild West. "Forget your troubles, settle back in your Tom Robbins La-Z-Boy for a delightful tramp through the little Kansas cowpoke town of 'You're Now Here.' I can't think of a better way to spend an afternoon than with Calvin Cheeseburgers, Katie McGhee, (the villain) Ike Drogue, and the other characters who inhabit the town, including two ghosts-on-call-when-needed."—Jim Lally, author of Stick Tight Man
Snow Falling on Water
Accents Publishing is honored to bring to you the latest poetry book by beloved Kentucky poet, writer and teacher Richard Taylor. In this new and selected collection, we can read poems spanning nearly five decades and hear the strong and memorable voice of the author. "Snow Falling on Water is an excellent introduction to Richard Taylor's poems. He writes with deep acumen and great humility about the mysteries of the world, both outer and inner, past and present. A recurrent image in his poems is that of new fallen snow which is then tracked across, leaving us with footprints, an image which becomes a blank page the writer fills with words. Taylor's tracks, his words, are a great blessing and lead us to the possibility of a previously unimagined communion with the world."—Michael Moran
Under the Seal
Under the Seal by Carol Mauriello is Accents Publishing's first literary murder mystery. "A mysterious murder in a small Kentucky river town sparks the unfolding of Carol Mauriello's Under the Seal. Mauriello crafts a series of small stories that magnify the whole: a police detective, searching for enough evidence to arrest and convict lonely Patsy Ann Singleton's killer. Patsy Ann's past associations with Mazewood men outside her marriage suggest notable entanglements. An evasive husband pleads innocent to deadly vindictiveness. A dedicated investigator strives for solid evidence to the contrary, suspense mounts, and the reader will feel compelled to follow the quest beyond a shadow of doubt."—Joe Sartor, Associate Professor Emeritus, Art
Painted Daydreams
Painted Daydreams is a multi-media experience: While evoking canonic images from artistic icons and iconoclasts alike, from Rothko to O'Keeffe to Basquiat, these ekphrastic poems also allow a reader to eavesdrop on intimate conversations between Beck and these artists who inspire her—the whispers in Van Gogh's one good, remaining ear backed by psychedelic riffs from Phish and the Grateful Dead. All the while, Beck's life in Kentucky—the collection's vivid underpainting—peers through, ensuring that though these poems may well have sprung from the staid environs of art museums, they breathe and sweat in the vivid, living world.
Bee-coursing Box
"Matthew Haughton's debut collection honors and extends Kentucky's great literary heritage, which stretches from Greenup to Bowling Green, the 18th century to now. In poems that dare 'pray there's a heaven for snakes,' and dare see a man 'growing like a sycamore out of the untamed earth,' he adds his worthy voice to the chorus."- Frederick Smock, Author of Guest House Limited availability. Please contact accents.publishing@gmail.com before ordering this book.