Little Light in the Grave, Volume 48

Jesse Graves is the author of five poetry collections, including Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine, and a collection of essays, Said-Songs: Essays on Poetry and Place. His work received the James Still Award for Writing about the Appalachian South from the Fellowship of Southern Writers and two Weatherford Awards in Poetry from Berea College. He teaches at East Tennessee State University, where he is Poet-in-Residence and Professor of English.Larry D. Thacker is a Kentuckian hailing from Johnson City, Tennessee. His writing is in over 200 publications. His three fiction collections include Working it Off in Labor County, Labor Days, Labor Nights: More Stories, and Everyday, Monsters (co-written, CM Chapman). His poetry includes five full poetry collections, New Red Words, Drifting in Awe, Grave Robber Confessional, Feasts of Evasion, and Gateless Menagerie, and two chapbooks, Voice Hunting and Memory Train. He is also the author of the folk history, Mountain Mysteries: The Mystic Traditions of Appalachia. He was a cast member on the Netflix original series, Swap Shop. His MFA in poetry and fiction was earned from West Virginia Wesleyan College.

"I suppose many poems spring from immediacy and owe themselves to the first response to an event or circumstance. But the poems I prefer have spent long years brooding and have the benefit of reflection. That is the case for the poems in this book that begin in graveyards and go back into regional, American, and human history. Back into the roots of these two primal poets, to a point where neither voice is known without the other. The passage of time for all of us is always an anguish and a gift. A Little Light in the Grave is a book that brings us both and I am grateful for it." —Maurice Manning, author of Snakedoctor and Bucolics"In A Little Light in the Grave, Jesse Graves and Larry D. Thacker braid their voices into a sustained meditation on how family, friendship, rural labor, inherited stories, and ordinary rituals are all sacred in hindsight and in the glow of the long afterlife of the places that shape us. Informed yet not limited by a shared Appalachian landscape, these poems move through cemeteries and farm fields, barns and backroads, in old trucks and at kitchen tables, even far-flung scenes of war, asking how the living continue in conversation with the dead. Rich with remembered details—shirts hanging in closets, tools in barns, wallets in drawers, photographs in boxes—this collaborative collection illuminates the dark vastness of loss, where grief, now familiar as one's arm or leg, is finally and finely shaped by love and language into something absolutely beautiful and valuable, something you are comforted to hold close." —Darnell Arnoult, author of Incantations and Galaxie Wagon"This is as fine a collection of elegiac poems as I've read in a long time, finely crafted and pitch perfect. In the poem 'Frame-Work,' Graves imagines keeping a 'window open in my mind / for memories to climb through' and that is exactly what these poems do with their unremitting passion to save the past from the future and so keep alive a treasure trove of life-giving memories. These poems live in that desire, that hope, as Thacker puts it in 'Casting,' that there are voices that might yet 'be translated.' And they are, brilliantly so, here by two of Appalachia's finest storyteller poets. These superb poems will cast more than a 'little light' into the graves of all the departed, as well as into the lives of all of us needing more light in these dark days."—Marc Harshman, Poet Laureate of West Virginia and author of Dispatch from the Mountain State