Reckonings

The deft, moving lyrics of Reckonings attempt to account for the slow violence of Appalachia's industrialization ¿ particularly its twin legacies of exploitative labor and toxic waste pollution ¿ while also positioning us in meaningful relation to this violence, the "Risk published in the air" by corrupt corporations. It's impossible work, making meaning out of the willful destruction of the working class and of the earth, but Ryan Walsh mounts a passionate defense of the too-often overlooked and devalued lives and landscapes of West Virginia. "Unincorporated? It was always corporate," Walsh asserts of the community where he grew up, and bears witness to a landscape and a people living beyond their own ruin. Far from hopeless, these powerful poems testify to the persistence of ordinary hopes despite injustice, and celebrate "this dark remaining/joy we take into our brief bodies."

¿Brian Teare, author of Doomstead Days