"With a voice that is at once sad, beautiful, angry, and deceptively lyric, Collins guides us through the heat-shimmered lowlands of her characters' everyday lives to the bittersweet inner sanctums that enable them to survive. These are trips from which we come away enlightened, emboldened, and sometimes enraged, but always strangely hopeful."-Will Lupens, from the foreword CD Collins's debut short story collection invites readers into a world shaped by the smell of tobacco leaves, the sweat of factory work, and the rush of rumors moving through a small town. A world where a besieged farmer attempts to protect herself from her father and comes to recognize that the white-hot fury they share is part of their inheritance. A public defender labors tirelessly for the community and against the forces that have destabilized her own happiness and autonomy. A solitary maintenance man communicates profoundly with animals and nature but is fearful of human connection. Blue Land offers twenty stories interwoven with complicated characters who struggle with loved ones, the dangers of longing, and the lure of addiction. This collection is a haunting work of Kentucky literature that probes southern and Appalachian life, sexual abuse, the nature of belonging, queer identity, and the environment. Collins's stories offer embodied histories of the state, shattering preconceived notions and effectively rendering characters whose voices are sometimes lost in a dismissive, uncomprehending world. But Blue Land is not just for those with generational roots in the region-it is for those who have just arrived, those who left long ago, and those willing to listen.
"The people in Collins's exceptionally well-wrought stories are Kentuckians, many but not all of whom moved away. All the characters come from hardscrabble folks. The shortest pieces are the most impressionistic, taking on the economy of poetry; thus, 'Hands' distills 'A History of Kentucky Tobacco Farming in Five Voices.' Those voices are all in the same family; Wendell Berry might envy Collins's
Ray Olson, Booklist
"CD Collins has the voice of a natural-born storyteller. The stories in this collection have the compressed beauty of poetry and the richness of novels. Original and unforgettable."
Stephen McCauley, author of The Object of My Affection and Alternatives to Sex
"In this gripping collection of stories, it's as if we meet the descendants of the tenant farmers documented so famously by James Agee and Walker Evans. But while treating her people with dignity and empathy, CD Collins also claims her rights as an insider. Beautifully crafted, Blue Land is both heartbreaking and hilarious."
Alexandra Marshall, author of Gus in Bronze and The Silence of Your Name
