Books
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
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