Tomorrow marks the publication day of Beauty Strip, my first full-length collection. I couldnt be more excited! Dedicated to my grandparents, Beauty Strip considers the ecosytems and communities of Appalachia, protests reckless industrialization, and investigates our human capacity to remake and redeem. Part sketchbook, part dreambook, Beauty Strip maps and ruminates on, haunts and is haunted by, the mountaintop removal sites and mill towns, the salt-works and bloomeries, that have scarred the land from West Virginia to Virginia to Tennessee. Here are links to the book at the Texas Book Consortiums website and at Amazon: tamupress/product/Beauty-Strip,7977.aspx amazon/Beauty-Strip-William-Kelley-Woolfitt/dp/1680030108 I’d much appreciate your help in spreading the news. If youd like a copy to review, let me know. williamwoolfitt.wordpress/beauty-strip/ Twitter: @williamwoolfitt, #BeautyStrip I love the voice and the passion I hear in Woolfitt’s poems. In Beauty Strip, he names the raw materials of the natural world so precisely and enters the cusps and edge spaces so confidently that the poems both mourn and reclaim the ruined mountains of his West Virginia home. There is hard-earned wisdom and a strong lyric line in these vital poems and William Kelley Woolfitt is one sweet singer. --Maggie Anderson, author of Windfall In the midst of overwhelming natural beauty, rendered with such sensuous language that the reader of William Kelley Woolfitt’s first full-length collection well-nigh swoons in delight, hides desecration, the earth left raw and bleeding behind the “beauty strip” the coal companies create to block from view their destruction. Therein lies the metaphorical paradox of this stirring, profoundly moving book of poems, the destruction that lies behind the disguise meant to allow us to keep living our lives in a state of unknowing. Around that troubling central image, however, pulses the natural world, “center and zenith” as Woolfitt describes it in “Ring of Earth,” echoing James Still’s abiding River of Earth. Through the beauty of his poetry, Woolfitt restores the world so carelessly and greedily desecrated. Stephen Spender once described poetry as “enchanted utterance.” Here is that utterance. Listen, and listen again, to its songs and its warnings. –Kathryn Stripling Byer, author of Wildwood Flower Woolfitts finely honed poems resonate with the language of Appalachia and bristle with the rich scents and textures of farm fields, forested ridges, and streams. Resisting nostalgia, he lays claim to the home place in the most honorable way: by describing it with clarity and painstaking grace. --Julia Spicher Kasdorf, author of Poetry in America
Posted on: Fri, 09 Jan 2015 03:26:49 +0000
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