Dedicated to blue-collar lifestyles and family secrets, Salt: Poems of Appalachian Roots pays homage to those born and raised in the Appalachia and to those familiar with the tribulations that come with poverty and failure. Combined with historic photographs by Lewis Hine, Doris Ulmann, Russell Lee, and others, this book exposes the depth and burden of personal and social struggles found among people in the Appalachia, but also offers a glimpse into their stalwart dedication to persevere.

In Hillbilly elegy, J.D. Vance described how his family moved from poverty to an upwardly mobile clan while navigating the collective demons of the past. The book has come to define Appalachia for much of the nation. This collection of essays is a retort, at turns rigorous, critical, angry, and hopeful, to the long shadow cast over the region and its imagining. But it also moves beyond Vance's book to allow Appalachians to tell their own diverse and complex stories of a place that is at once culturally rich and economically distressed, unique and typically American. -- adapted from back cover

An unflinching, heartbreaking collection of poetry about life in the U.S. as a Brazilian immigrant, Aline Mello's debut poetry collection, More Salt Than Diamond, is a true testament to the power of finding a home. Born in Brazil, Aline Mello immigrated to the United States in 1997. Using her experience as an undocumented woman during a time of incredible flux and tension, Mello's debut collection of poetry, More Salt than Diamond, speaks to her struggles while also addressing the larger cultural issues on an inclusive and global scale. Lyrical, moving, deeply emotional, and sometimes painful to read, Mello uses exquisitely sharp yet widely accessible language to crack open a life in multitudes. She shines a rare light on what it means to be a Brazilian immigrant in diaspora, stretched thin between borders and fraught family tension yet belonging nowhere. Aline is poised to not only change the face of Latinx poetry in years to come but to redefine the power of undocumented creators and artists.

Sky Under the Roof: Poems by Hilda Downer

A regional studies review.

Winner of the 1997 Appalachian Studies Award Appalachian Writers Association 1999 Book of the Year Winner of the Susan Koppleman Award of the Popular Culture Association for Best Edited Collection in Women's Studies Joyce Dyer is director of writing and associate professor of English at Hiram College, Ohio."

Richard Drake has skillfully woven together the various strands of the Appalachian experience into a sweeping whole. Touching upon folk traditions, health care, the environment, higher education, the role of blacks and women, and much more, Drake offers a compelling social history of a unique American region. The Appalachian region, extending from Alabama in the South up to the Allegheny highlands of Pennsylvania, has historically been characterized by its largely rural populations, rich natural resources that have fueled industry in other parts of the country, and the strong and wild, undeveloped land. The rugged geography of the region allowed Native American societies, especially the Cherokee, to flourish. Early white settlers tended to favor a self-sufficient approach to farming, contrary to the land grabbing and plantation building going on elsewhere in the South. The growth of a market economy and competition from other agricultural areas of the country sparked an economic decline of the region's rural population at least as early as 1830. The Civil War and the sometimes hostile legislation of Reconstruction made life even more difficult for rural Appalachians. Recent history of the region is marked by the corporate exploitation of resources. Regional oil, gas, and coal had attracted some industry even before the Civil War, but the postwar years saw an immense expansion of American industry, nearly all of which relied heavily on Appalachian fossil fuels, particularly coal. What was initially a boon to the region eventually brought financial disaster to many mountain people as unsafe working conditions and strip mining ravaged the land and its inhabitants. A History of Appalachia also examines pockets of urbanization in Appalachia. Chemical, textile, and other industries have encouraged the development of urban areas. At the same time, radio, television, and the internet provide residents direct links to cultures from all over the world. The author looks at the process of urbanization as it belies commonly held notions about the region's rural character.

Romey's Order is an indelible sequence of poems voiced by an invented (and inventive) boy-speaker called Romey, set alongside a river in the South Carolina lowcountry. As the word-furious eye and voice of these poems, Romey urgently records--and tries to order--the objects, inscape, injuries, and idiom of his "blood-home" and childhood world. Sounding out the nerves and nodes of language to transform "every burn-mark and blemish," to “bind our river-wrack and leavings," Romey seeks to forge finally (if even for a moment) a chord in which he might live. Intently visceral, aural, oral, Atsuro Riley's poems bristle with musical and imaginative pleasures, with story-telling and picture-making of a new and wholly unexpected kind.