POEMS

A collection of haunting lyricism that evokes the beauty and hardship of the rural South, by a revered American master of letters—the award-winning, bestselling author of the novels Serena, Something Rich and Strange, and Above the Waterfall.

In this incandescent, profound, and accessible collection, beloved and award-winning poet, novelist, and short-story writer Ron Rash vividly channels the rhythms of life in Appalachia, deftly capturing the panoply of individuals who are its heart and soul—men and women inured to misfortune and hard times yet defined by tremendous fortitude, resilience, and a fierce sense of community.

In precise, supple language that swerves from the stark to the luminous, Rash richly describes the splendor of the natural landscape and poignantly renders the lives of those dependent on its bounty—in cotton mills and tobacco fields, farmlands and forests. The haunting memories and shared histories of these people—their rituals and traditions—animate this land, and are celebrated in Rash’s crystalline, intensely imagined verse.

With an eye for the surprising and vivid detail, Ron Rash powerfully captures the sorrows and exaltations of this wondrous world he knows intimately. Illuminating and indelible, Poems demonstrates his rich talents and confirms his legacy as a standard-bearer for the literature of the American South.

“Rash illuminates his dark material with humor and tenderness...The elegies for a landscape and its inhabitants in POEMS: New and Selected leave us with a renewed sense of how ‘too much too soon disappears’” — New York Times Book Review

In this incandescent and profound collection, beloved and award-winning poet, novelist, and short-story writer Ron Rash channels the rhythms of life in Appalachia, deftly capturing the panoply of individuals who are its heart.

With an eye for the surprising and vibrant detail, Rash powerfully captures the sorrows of this wondrous world he knows intimately. As B.H. Fairchild has noted, “There is nothing else quite like this work in American poetry at the present time, and we desperately need it.” Illuminating and indelible, Poems demonstrates Rash’s rich talents and confirms his legacy as a standard-bearer for the literature of the American South.

Ron Rash is the author of the 2009 PEN/Faulkner finalist and New York Times bestseller Serena and Above the Waterfall, in addition to four prizewinning novels, including The Cove, One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River, and The World Made Straight; four collections of poems; and six collections of stories, among them Burning Bright, which won the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and Chemistry and Other Stories, which was a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award. Twice the recipient of the O. Henry Prize, he teaches at Western Carolina University.