Rose McLarney – författare

Selected as a winner of the National Poetry Series by Robert WrigleyRose McLarney has won acclaim for image-rich poems that explore her native southern Appalachia and those who love and live and lose on it. Her second collection broadens these investigations in poems that examine the shape-shifting quality of memory, as seen in folktales that have traveled across oceans and through centuries, and in how we form recollections of our own lives. An opening sequence presents contemporary ghost stories:  men who gather at dawn in the gas station parking lots of small towns; the mountain lion that paces the edge of a receding tree line. A middle section draws connections between Appalachia and Latin America, places that share qualities of biological and cultural richness—places that are threatened by modernization. A final sequence retells the stories of earlier poems, posing questions about how we construct our landscapes and frame our views.

Rubble Masonry is a collection of lyric essays that takes its title from the practice of stone masons who, rather than using materials cut to ideal measurements, work with found rocks' natural shapes. It combines the rich images and musical language of poetry with prose's capacity to share personal narratives and information from wide-ranging sources. Diverse content and innovative form distinguish a book that explores the places in which its author, Rose McLarney, finds herself as a woman from the mountain South—in history, national dialogues, public spaces, the natural world, and lineages that extend beyond an individual's life on earth.