Appalachia is no stranger to loss. The region suffers regular ecological devastation wrought by strip mining, fracking, and deforestation as well as personal tragedy brought on by enduring poverty and drug addiction. In Driving with the Dead, Appalachian poet, teacher, and artist Jane Hicks weaves an earnest and impassioned elegy for an imperiled yet doggedly optimistic people and place. Exploring the roles that war, environment, culture, and violence play in Appalachian society, the hard-hitting collection is visceral and unflinchingly honest, mourning a land and people devastated by economic hardship, farm foreclosures, and mountaintop removal.
With empathy and a voice of experience, Hicks offers readers a poignant collection of poems that addresses themes of grief and death while also illustrating the beauty, grace, and resilience of the Appalachian people. Invoking personal memories, she explores how the loss of physical landscape has also devastated the region's psychological landscape.
Graphic, bold, and heartfelt, Driving with the Dead is an honest and compelling call to arms. Hicks laments the irreplaceable treasures that we have lost but also offers wisdom for healing and reconciliation.
"In an interview, the late Seamus Heaney once spoke of how the voices in his poems rose up from the ground on which he stood. So it is with Jane Hicks's poems in her new collection. They come together in 'Summer Rain' as a 'pooling of memory,' Even the ancient oaks have voices in this poem, and why shouldn't they? They are ancestors, too. Hicks's poems gather up the stories of family, those lost i
Kathryn Stripling Byer, former North Carolina poet laureate
"Hicks knows the idiom and flavor (and humor) of the mountains ... This is a strong collection whose vitality derives from its crisp and particular language, its ample detail, its sense of perspective and wholeness, ultimately its artful rendering of experience that are authentically and memorably human. [These poems] are an appreciation of the sorrows and complexity of life not only in Appalachia
