Description: Poem by poem, Survant takes readers on an imaginative expedition--through unspoiled Shawnee cornfields, down the wild Ohio River, and into the depths of the region's ancient coal seams.
Brief description: The recipient of the State Street Press Poetry Prize, the Arkansas Poetry Prize, and other accolades, Joe Survant is the author of We Will All Be Changed; Anne and Alpheus, 1842-1882; Rafting Rise; and The Presence of Snow in the Tropics. His poetry has appeared in Prairie Schooner, the American Voice, Chelsea, Poet and Critic, Stand Magazine (U.K.), the Columbia Review, Cincinnati Poetry Review, Nimrod, Hellas, Exquisite Corpse, and the Sow's Ear Poetry Review. He served as Kentucky's Poet Laureate from 2003 to 2004.
Review Quotes:
This book of dramatic monologues is, as Joe Survant tells us in his introduction, a "net of imagination cast into history." The physical difficulties of life in eighteenth-century "kentuckee" are made vibrantly clear, but it is the emotional hardship, loss and its aftermath, that Survant excels in conveying. With fresh tropes and stunning images he delves into the "dark patina of sorrow." Kentucky is Joe Survant's native land and loss is his ground, a "knowledge [that] can be read in nature, however brutal the book." -Natasha Sajé, author of VIvarium