I picked this up in part because the author spoke recently on campus, plus she is teaching here now. However, I also picked it up curious because the book's poems look at Appalachia, an area where I live now, so I wanted to learn a bit more. bell hooks' poetry looks at the landscape, the people, its tense history, the seasons, the coal miners, and more. The poems are short, but they are very evocative and moving at times. The author brings a lot of her personal experience as a Kentucky native to her poetry as well. It is a book I highly recommend. ( )

I had no idea bell hooks wrote poetry.

How glad am I to discover she does?

This slim little volume is about place, identity, belonging, coming home and all the emotional turmoil and joy that comes with it. What I adore about hooks' writing in this volume is how articulate she is. She is so precisely able to express herself and her thoughts.

When I read her writing, particularly her essays, I feel like she has said exactly what she needs to say and used the right number of words doing so. It's not like with Hemingway, where his writing is sparse and minimalist and bare. hooks writes with so much purpose that I feel it tangibly when she puts pen to paper.

As to the actual poems, I loved so many of them. They were full of beautiful (if painful) metaphors about loss, land, freedom, blackness, ownership and all of the above. I feel that I preferred her poems when they were steeped more in metaphor and not necessarily so explicit about, for example, slavery.

I felt that the intertwining of the environment and the discussion of the history of Kentucky made her poems what they were. I didn't want her to tell me the history, I wanted her to show me.

I'll leave you with a poem of hers, so that you may decide for yourself if you'd like to read it.

3.
night moves
through thick dark
a heavy silence outside
near the front window
a black bear
stamps down plants
pushing back brush
fleeing manmade
confinement
roaming unfettered
confident
any place can become home
strutting down
a steep hill
as though freedom
is all
in the now
no past
no present ( )