Linda Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature – serie

This is a daughter’s story. In Small Fires, Julie Marie Wade recreates the landscape of her childhood with a lacemaker’s care, then turns that precise attention on herself. There are floating tea lights in the bath, coddled blossoms in the garden, and a mother straddling her teenage daughter’s back, astringent in hand, to better scrub her not-quite-presentable pores. And throughout, Wade traces this lost world with the same devotion as her mother among her award-winning roses. Small Fires is essay as elegy, but it is also essay as parsing, reconciliation, and celebration, all in the attempt to answer the question—what have you given up in order to become who you are?

Amelia Martens's prose poems reveal expansive ideas in compressed language. From the domestic to the geopolitical, from the mundane to the miraculous, these brief vignettes take the form of prayers, parables, confessions, and revelations. Intimate and urgent, Martens's poems are strange, darkly funny, and utterly beguiling.Amelia Martens is the author of the chapbooks Purgatory (Black Lawrence Press, 2012), Clatter (Floating Wolf Quarterly, 2013), and A Series of Faults (Finishing Line Press, 2014). She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Indiana University, and lives in Paducah, Kentucky, where she teaches at West Kentucky Community & Technical College.

The Motel of the Stars is a novel set in Kentucky and North Carolina on the eve of the 1997 anniversary of the Harmonic Convergence, a mystical alignment of planets and a portending of universal peace first celebrated in 1987. Part satire of New Age philosophy and part commentary on a modern, fear-based era, the novel is the story of Jason Sanderson and Lory Llewellyn, who travel to the 1997 Anniversary Gathering at the foot of Grandfather Mountain in North Carolina. Both characters have for ten years mourned the loss of Sam Sanderson, Jason’s son and Lory’s lover, and both must emerge from grief into a new age of possibility and hope.Karen Salyer McElmurray is the author of Surrendered Child: A Birth Mother’s Journey, described by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution as “a moving meditation on loss and memory and the rendering of truth and story.” The book was the recipient of the 2003 AWP Award for Creative Nonfiction and a National Book Critics Circle Notable Book. McElmurray’s debut novel, Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven, was winner of the 2001 Thomas and Lillie D. Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing. Her work has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the North Carolina Arts Council. She lives in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she is an assistant professor in creative writing at Georgia College and State University; she is also the creative nonfiction editor for Arts and Letters.

“Reading these absolutely terrific poems, with their southern colloquial drawl and sober Buddhist insight, is a bit like having a sage old sleepy tiger purr in your ear while you lie at the edge of the swamp in back of Billy-Joes's pickup truck.”—Dazed & Confused Magazine“Sustaining, inspiring, even rescuing.”—Will Oldham, musician“A true beast of a man with insight and beauty to spare.”—Harmony Korine, filmmaker“Brett Eugene Ralph can look at a woman dancing alone, ‘eyes closed, lips parted, held aloft / in one hand half a mango, / a gigantic butcher knife / clutched in the other,’ and know immediately that she’s praying.”—Andrew HudginsBrett Eugene Ralph lives in rural western Kentucky. His country-rock ensemble, Brett Eugene Ralph’s Kentucky Chrome Revue, can be heard in seedy dives throughout the South.

2011 Eric Hoffer Award in the General Fiction2011 The Thomas & Lillie D. Chaffin Award“Alex Taylor is a fresh new voice, not just in Kentucky, but in American literature.”'--Chris OffuttLike a room soaked in the scent of whiskey, perfume, and sweat, Alex Taylor's America is at once intoxicating, vulnerable, and full of brawn. These stories reveal the hidden dangers in the coyote-infested fields, rusty riverbeds, and abandoned logging trails of Kentucky. There we find tactile, misbegotten characters, desperate for the solace found in love, revenge, or just enough coal to keep an elderly woman's stove burning a few more nights. Echoing Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner, Taylor manages fervor as well as humor in these dusky, shotgun plots, where in one story, a man spends seven days in a jon boat with his fiddle and a Polaroid camera, determined to enact vengeance on the water-logged body of a used car salesman; and in another, a demolition derby enthusiast nicknamed "Wife" watches his two wild, burning love interests duke it out, only to determine he would rather be left alone entirely. Together, these stories present a resonant debut collection from an unexpected new voice in Southern fiction.Alex Taylor has worked as a day laborer on tobacco farms, as a car detailer at a used automotive lot, as a sorghum peddler, as a tender of suburban lawns, at various fast food chains, and at a cigarette lighter factory. He holds an MFA from the University of Mississippi and now teaches at Western Kentucky University. He lives in Rosine, Kentucky.

"My Reptile"Little frilléd lizardwith your big mouthand your clutch of egg.Pure urge iguana—I wanna wannawanna—heavy petin a moist habitat.Your dewlap licksdown my spine;your creep yearns,yearns your crawl,like a small machinethat you rev andrev and rev untilthe engine floods.Gin and bleach: two clear liquids aiming for purity, bordering the toxic. Catherine Wing's poems are soaked in her cocktail, mixing doubt, loneliness, rough elbows, and razor focus. It riddles, aiming askew for a straight answer: how do we make our way through this world?

"Buy this book, it's a barn burner!"—Dorothy AllisonIn an extraordinarily diverse anthology of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and graphic narratives by contemporary Appalachian writers, Red Holler takes us over and beyond the stock imagery of rural mountain communities. We travel into housing projects, forest-stripped ravines, and trailer parks, to explore vibrant hometown and migrant Appalachian cultures. Editors John E. Branscum and Wayne Thomas have assembled a collection spanning ten years and communities in locales ranging from Mississippi to New York, placing fresh new voices alongside widely known and celebrated authors. Drawing on Appalachian literature’s roots in Native American myth, African American urban legend, and European folk culture, and embracing Appalachian urban fiction, the Southern Gothic, gritty no-holds-barred realism, and magical realism, the stories and poems of Red Holler elegantly cohere to perfectly depict what makes Appalachia so fascinating: its irreverent and outlaw challenges to mainstream notions of propriety and convention.

Winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut FictionBarnes & Noble 2014 Discover Great New Writers Selection, Third PlaceThe stories in Elegy on Kinderklavier explore the profound loss and intricate effects of war on lives that have been suddenly misaligned. A diplomat navigates a hostile political climate and an arranged marriage in an Israeli settlement on a newly discovered planet; a small town in Kansas shuns the army recruiter who signed up its boys as troops are deployed to Iraq, falling in helicopters and on grenades; a family dissolves around mental illness and a child's body overtaken by cancer. The moment a soldier steps on an explosive device is painfully reproduced, nanosecond by nanosecond. Arna Bontemps Hemenway's stories feel pulled out of time and place, and the suffering of his characters seem at once otherworldly and stunningly familiar. Elegy on Kinderklavier is a disquieting exploration of what it is to lose and be lost.