A breathtaking, artful set of poems on loss, family, place, and memory. * Kirkus (Starred review) *
We reckon that nine generations in Appalachia is long enough for a place to get in the bones of a family, and that kinheritance has marked Kari Gunter-Seymour with an intuitive feel for one of America's most isolated and peculiar regions. * Foreword Reviews *
Kari Gunter-Seymour's talent shines like a diamond in this collection: solid, clear, sparkling. * Southern Literary Review *
These poems are delicately nuanced and so hard-edged, so unique, they can make you catch your breath.
The poems of Kari Gunter-Seymour's Alone in the House of My Heart are ragged with loss, yet sustained by all they take in through the senses, from Mother's 'cat-eye glasses, Pentecostal bun,' whispering 'loud enough / for the soprano section to hear,' to 'collards and heirloom tomatoes / strapped to stakes like sinners / begging the lash.' As the details accrue, they generate a place conjured by memory, the Appalachia of the speaker's upbringing, where she nested in the loft of the barn in the hay, 'spicy sweet,' and where canned fruit cocktail is the ultimate delicacy. Still, it is a place sowed with the seeds of its own undoing-fracking, coal dust, addiction. Language itself is somehow larger even than the consciousness that creates it, more expansive than right and wrong, and 'free of the splintery / cold of our foolish selves,' poetry, which here is synonymous with hard-won love.
Kari Gunter-Seymour's poems are full of passion: passion for people, passion for place, passion for imagination. Her images are 'pinpricks grey and blue' that inhabit us as readers, feed us strength, and give us history-the good, the bad, and the triumphant. In poem after poem, [she] gives us a map to the unsayable and the courage to say it. She knows the pleasures of daily living, the dignity of grieving, and the terror of loss. She knows that when 'the alcohol has stopped working,' all we have are words to get us by, get us through, and get us over.
Kari Gunter-Seymour weaves memory, place, love, and pain into a vibrant, complex tapestry of her native southeastern Ohio Appalachia. 'So much here depends upon / a green corn stalk, a patched barn roof, / weather, the Lord, community,' she writes. The images in these poems are striking, the language fresh. We smell 'the tang of weeping cherry,' see up close the devastation of 'fracking waste, red clay dust, the bitter soot / of coal's see ya later sucka!' Her people are flesh and blood: a great-grandfather 'at seventy, / firm of belly, back plumb as a disc blade,' her mother 'bronzed and shapely' in a field of daffodils. Alone in the House of My Heart is a deeply moving portrayal of family and home, inheritance and loss, written by a poet whose gift is to insist 'ordinary things be somehow more.'
'Everything has a dream of itself,' writes Kari Gunter-Seymour in this splendid new collection. These poems sing of apples and alcoholism, families that pass along wounding and wonder and hard-earned laughter. 'Promise the garden will thrive, / the thirsty Ohio will hold its drink and the Zoloft / prescribed by the clinic will banish the spirits,' ends another poem, and it is just this combination of hard truth and humor, love, and the ache of loss right below it that draws me in. These poems stubbornly celebrate the people and landscape of Appalachia; they are American, melancholy, life loving. I wish I could quote every word of 'An Appalachian Woman's Guide to Beer Drinking' here, but you'll just have to read it for yourself.
A strong collection, evocative of James Wright in its images of land and pathos and Gerard Manley Hopkins in its music and the power of its language.
