Kentucky Voices

You never know what will fall from the sky... In this remarkable novel, George Ella Lyon creates characters rich and vibrant as the Kentucky landscape they call home, touching that secret place in all of us where we wait for love's transforming power...You never know what will fall from the sky...

A teenage boy fighting in the American Civil War becomes a Kentucky legend in this historical novel by the author of Girty and Elkhorn. October 11, 1864. The Civil War rages on in Kentucky, where Union and Confederate loyalties have turned neighbors into enemies and once-proud soldiers into drifters, thieves, and outlaws. Stephen Gano Burbridge, radical Republican and military commander of the district of Kentucky, has declared his own war on this new class of marauding guerrillas, and his weekly executions at Louisville's public commons draw both crowds and widespread criticism. In this time of fear and division, a Kentucky journalist created a legend: Sue Mundy, female guerrilla, a "she-devil" and "tigress" who was leading her band of outlaws across the state in an orgy of greed and bloodshed. Though the "Sue Mundy" of the papers was created as an affront to embarrass Union authorities, the man behind the woman-twenty-year-old Marcellus Jerome Clarke-was later brought to account for "her" crimes. Historians have pieced together clues about this orphan from southern Kentucky whose idealism and later disillusionment led him to his fate, but Richard Taylor's work of imagination makes this history flesh-an exciting story of the Civil War told from the perspective of one of its most enigmatic figures. Sue Mundy opens in 1861, when fifteen-year-old Jerome Clark, called "Jarom," leaves everyone he loves-his aunt, his adopted family, his sweetheart-to follow his older cousin into the Confederate infantry. There, confronted by the hardships of what he slowly understands is a losing fight, Jarom's romanticized notions of adventure and heroism are crushed under the burdens of hunger, sleepless nights, and mindless atrocities. Captured by Union forces and imprisoned in Camp Morton, Jarom makes a daring escape, crossing the Ohio River under cover of darkness and finding refuge and refreshed patriotic zeal first in Adam R. Johnson's Tenth Kentucky Calvary, then among General John Hunt Morgan's infamous brigade. Morgan's shocking death in 1864 proves a bad omen for the Confederate cause, as members of his group of raiders scatter-some to rejoin organized forces, others, like Jarom, to opt for another, less civilized sort of warfare. Displaced and desperate for revenge, Jarom and his band of Confederate deserters wreak havoc in Kentucky: a rampage of senseless murder and thievery in an uncertain quest to inflict punishment on Union sympathizers. Long-locked and clean-shaven, Jarom is mistakenly labeled female by the media-but Sue Mundy is about more than the transformation of a man into a woman, and then a legend. Ironically, Sue Mundy becomes the persona by which Jarom's darkest self is revealed, and perhaps redeemed. Praise for Sue Mundy "Fans of the Civil War and historical military fiction will appreciate the author's depiction of war in a border state." -Publishers Weekly "Taylor's gift here is to bring history alive. His writing has always been informed by a deep love and affinity for history?his poetry and his fiction?particularly as it relates to the present." -Louisville Courier-Journal

"A collection of poems that are bold, inviting, charming, different, humorous, and irreverent. Often, they slip the bonds of common expectation." -Northern Kentucky Tribune When Kathleen Driskell tells her husband that she's gone to visit the neighbors, she means something different than most. The noted poet-whose last book, Seed Across Snow, was twice listed as a national bestseller by the Poetry Foundation-lives in an old country church just outside Louisville, Kentucky. Next door is an old graveyard that she was told had fallen out of use. In this marvelous new collection, this turns out not to be the case as the poet's fascination with the "neighbors" brings the burial ground back to life. Driskell frequently strolls the cemetery grounds, imagining the lives and loves of those buried beside her property. These "neighbors," with burial dates as early as 1848, inspire poems that weave stories, real and imagined, from the epitaphs and unmarked graves. Shifting between perspectives, she embraces and inhabits the voices of those laid to rest while also describing the grounds, the man who mows around the markers, and even the flocks of black birds that hover above before settling amongst the gravestones. Next Door to the Dead transcends time and place, linking the often disconnected worlds of the living and the deceased. Just as examining the tombstones forces the author to look more closely at her own life, Driskell's poems and their muses compel us to examine our own mortality, as well as how we impact the finite lives of those around us. "Driskell has written her path to the Kentuckian sublime." -Shane McCrae, author of Sometimes I Never Suffered

A spirited Southern woman upends the insular world of her small Kentucky town in this acclaimed debut novel by "a storyteller of distinction" (Publishers Weekly). Kentucky, 1944. Though she hails from a Fundamentalist Baptist family, there is nothing conventional about Martha Bragg Pickett Miracle. In her youth, she smoked cigarettes, rode motorcycles, and snuck across the Knob Fork River to buy beer from Catholics-and fall in love with one. Twenty years later, Martha has settled into marriage. But deep down, she's just as rebellious as she ever was. The arrival of a smooth-talking Yankee contractor leads Martha to turn her life upside down-unaware that her son will follow suit. Both heartfelt and shrewdly humorous, this widely acclaimed first novel from author Fenton Johnson is an affecting look at one woman's reawakening and her son's coming of age in the American heartland.

Along with his siblings, Raphael Hardin left his childhood home in rural Kentucky. Grappling with an AIDS diagnosis, he returns to care for his dying father. Told from the perspectives of Raphael, his family, and their lifelong neighbor, Fenton Johnson's landmark novel reveals the blood struggles and binding loves of a broken family made whole.

Literary fiction has presented readers with centuries of memorable women in trouble. Here, the author of the widely praised and beloved Come and Go, Molly Snow, Kentucky novelist Mary Ann Taylor-Hall, offers Jo Sinclair, a long-term single parent of four children. Fleeing an abusive relationship, she winds up in Sea Cove, New Jersey, in front of The Breakers, a salty old hotel in the process of renovation. In this unlikely setting, Jo finds a way to renovate herself, to reclaim the promising life that was derailed by pregnancy when she was fourteen. She impulsively convinces the owner to give her a job painting the rooms and settles in with her youngest child, thirteen-year-old Nick. A grand cast of characters wanders through this little world, among them Iris Zephyr, the hotel's ninety-two-year-old permanent boarder; Charlie, a noble mixed breed dog; Wendy, Jo's tough eighteen-year-old daughter, who has suffered most from her mother's past mistakes; Marco, the nearby gas station owner, who bids fair to become her mother's next mistake. Soon Victor Mangold, Jo's former teacher, a well-known and exuberant poet, arrives on the premises to stir everything up, including Jo's yearning for a life of art and committed love. At The Breakers is a deeply felt and beautifully written novel about forgiveness and reconciliation. Its heroine, put through the fire, comes out with a chance for happiness, if she can muster the faith, courage, and optimism to take that chance.

In 1995, Chris Holbrook burst onto the southern literary scene with Hell and Ohio: Stories of Southern Appalachia, stories that Robert Morgan described as "elegies for land and lives disappearing under mudslides from strip mines and new trailer parks and highways." Now, with the publication of Upheaval, Holbrook more than answers the promise of that auspicious debut. In eight interrelated stories set in Eastern Kentucky, Holbrook again captures a region and its people as they struggle in the face of poverty, isolation, change, and the devastation of land and resources at the hands of the coal and timber industries In the title story, Haskell sees signs of disaster all around him, from the dangers inherent in the strip-mining machinery he and his coworkers operate to the accident waiting to happen when his son plays with a socket wrench. Holbrook employs a native's ear for dialect and turns of phrase to reveal his characters' complex interior lives. In "The Timber Deal," two brothers - Russell, a recovering addict recently released from prison, and Dwight, who hasn't worked since being injured in a coal truck accident - try to convince their upwardly mobile sister, Helen, to agree to lease out timber rights to the family land. Dwight is unable to communicate his feelings, even as he seethes with rage: "Helen can't see past herself, is what it is. If John James had fractured his back in two places, it'd be a different story. If he'd broke his neck, it'd be a different story told." Written with a gritty, unflinching realism reminiscent of the work of Larry Brown and Cormac McCarthy, the stories in Upheaval prove that Holbrook is not only a faithful chronicler and champion of Appalachia's working poor but also one of the most gifted writers of his generation.