Description: A portrait of disappearing rural America, Going Across the Water honors working-class life through reflective poems on memory, nature, and change in Pennsylvania's Appalachian landscapes. With clarity and insight, Harry Humes captures coal-country labor, family, and quiet epiphanies that continue to resonate today.
Review Quotes:
"Exquisitely edited and judiciously selected by Daniel Donaghy, Going Across the Water gathers in a single volume the finest work of one of our nation's most distinguished writers of Appalachia. For nearly half a century, Harry Humes chronicled with acute sensitivity both the wonder and hardships of Pennsylvania's anthracite region. Whether writing about the final moments of doomed miners trapped in a collapsed coal tunnel, the meandering geography and solace of a trout stream, or the high loneliness of a coyote atop the Owl's Head pinnacle on the Appalachian Trail, Humes renders his beloved Pennsylvania and its people with unflinching clarity and tenderness. Having escaped the hardscrabble lives of his ancestors, Humes instead mines non-human nature for illuminating metaphors that ground us in an authentic, recognizable world. In so doing, he shows us how place, time, memory, empathy, and keen observation can coalesce into beautifully crafted poems that suffuse our lives with greater understanding."--Robert Bernard Hass, executive director of the Robert Frost Society