Publisher's Synopsis
Shadow and Breeze is a book of personal and historical poems focusing primarily on Jenkins, Kentucky, a former coal-camp town in the mountains of Appalachia. Informed by family history, archival research, and personal experience, this collection attempts to celebrate and animate the lives of people living in a town still struggling with the poverty, social isolation, and cultural marginalization common to much of Appalachia. Other poems in Shadow and Breeze tell the story of my younger brother's mental illness. As a result, an unstated but understood connection is made between the pain and difficulty of living in a world made strange by schizophrenia and living in a town reeling from the legacy of an unsustainable industry of extraction.
