Overview

Incomer is a story in poetry about falling in love-with life, with change, with the rural hills of the mid-Appalachians, with the challenge of living close to the land, and with possibility. ""Take a kid who grew up in a city, put her / next to a pond with a pole, and soon enough, / she will catch a fish and not know what to do / with it."" It swirls with birds, seasons, persistence, and the aching hunger to find belonging. Present dangers and sharp memories of past wounds weave in and out as the poet sets down roots and persists, foot to the ground, in a strange new place that becomes beloved. Meanwhile, the poet grieves the cost of disconnection as her mother's illness and death bring her back to what she left when she moved away from the familiar. Bonnie Proudfoot's poems all have a strong pulse, alive with hope and the possibility of transcendence; she climbs through thickets of joys and hardships, growing stronger, understanding more about her chosen home along the way. She questions whether she's ""grafted to something native,"" becoming part of the land and animals and people under assault by corporate greed, by environmental changes, by societal fractures. An understanding-of self, of place, of yearning and loss-intertwines with the landscapes and seasons of the Appalachian region.

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9781945049651

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Reviews

Bonnie Proudfoot's Incomer is an intimate and powerful meditation on the meaning of home-those we choose, those we leave, and those we hold within. ""Threshold of rough-hewn / slats. How to carry myself across,"" the poet asks of her early marriage in West Virginia, and this question resonates throughout poems of her New York past and her southern Ohio home as Proudfoot carries us with her on this lyrical journey of discovery. -Pauletta Hansel, author of Will There Also Be Singing? and Heartbreak Tree ""What is there to look to / but the landscape?"" Bonnie Proudfoot writes in her striking collection Incomer. Like the scion-a young shoot grafted from one tree variety onto another-the speaker in these poems heals in place, a city transplant on a rural branch. Whether sitting by her dying mother's bedside in Queens or lamenting smoke from an underground coal fire in Appalachian woods, Proudfoot's richly textured work reckons with her ""own stitched life."" -Ellen Austin-Li, author of Incidental Pollen, runner-up for the Madville Publishing Arthur Smith Poetry Prize The beauty of Bonnie Proudfoot's Incomer lies in the varied landscapes she extracts with such ease and lyric detail from the vicissitudes of daily life. These landscapes range from the literal mountains and farms of southern Appalachia to familial concerns and cultural shifts, to the vast expanse of memories Proudfoot shares of so intimately, admitting as she does that we are surrounded by loss, ""our bodies tethered / by twisted threads, the hills / and valleys of us, all / falling out of line and / falling back into it, / holding on to / less each day."" (From ""Holding On."") -James Alan Riley, author of Uncertain Mythologies and Broken Frequencies With sensory brilliance, Incomer follows a blood-and-rust covenant running with the land. Narrative poems map Central Appalachia's paradox of loose parts, reminding wanderers seeking roots that no one escapes being caught in brambles. Proudfoot's gritty storytelling demands reconciliation: here, a path unfolds with the ""scratch-made"" generational love of cloud silver, soup spoon, bird-wing; there, industrial ""altars to extinction"" await, holding toxic drip, gas flare, gun trigger, boneyard. To claim any home, we must become the body ""holding on"" through grief, interpreting signs of joy. -Sherry Cook Stanforth, Founder, Originary Arts Initiative, and Managing Editor, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel

Author Information

Bonnie Proudfoot moved from New York to West Virginia in 1979. She received a BA in art education and English education from Fairmont State, an MA in English from West Virginia University, and an MA in creative writing from Hollins University. She was an associate professor at Hocking College, Nelsonville, Ohio, for over twenty years. Proudfoot received a fellowship in the arts from the West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. She has published fiction, poetry, reviews, and essays. Her novel, Goshen Road, (Ohio University Press/Swallow Press, 2020) was selected by the Women's National Book Association for Great Group Reads, long-listed for the 2021 PEN/Hemingway Award, and awarded the Writers Conference of Northern Appalachia (WCoNA) Book of the Year. Her writing has been nominated for the Best of the Net and for a Pushcart Prize. Her debut book of poems, Household Gods, was published by Sheila-Na-Gig Editions in 2022. She lives in Athens, Ohio, and delights in the writing communities she has found throughout the region. To find out more about Proudfoot, visit bonnieproudfootblog.wordpress.com.

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