Overview

This debut collection of poems by Ian Hall illuminates daily life for a family and community in eastern Kentucky, all the while singing with verbal delights. Creekwater Mansions documents the intimacy of duress. A son puffs cigarette smoke down his grandad's throat because the old man is too feeble to draw breath; retired draft horses learn to dance; the land manager's hired muscle flaunts an axe-handle; a grieving family uses a coffin as a card table; schoolboys siphon gin out of shag carpet just to catch a high. These are the variations of affection and kinship, so informed by and inextricable from the macabre tedium that abides in the back pews, dialysis clinics, and County-Line Liquors of daily life in Eastern Kentucky. While these poems are frequently ordered around grisly attitudes and occurrences, moods of indolent provincialism, and the evermore-contagious disease of despair, these are at their core love poems. Hall writes, ""Those are my people. I want nothing more than to esteem them and to show outsiders that even gruesomely human moments stripped of any decoration still have the heft and horsepower to be transcendent.""

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9781958094662

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Reviews

There is no one else rendering poetry like Ian Hall. His poems are gnarly gardens of deep appreciation of what this tangled, earthly world offers. Nouns often set loose in verbiage. And verbs set down roots in the lush soil of memory. I consider most of Hall's poems as praise poems, praise for this story we have found ourselves in, generations after a story was passed down of first man and first woman thrust from a garden for being hungry and curious. We are in it now, and Hall's potent poems illuminate the unsung details of a family, a community striving to live where to make a life is impossible. - Joy Harjo, 23rd U.S. Poet Laureate All too often, the contemporary poetry that gets most lauded is little more than chopped-up prose with the right attitudes, so reading Ian Hall's poems is a much-needed reminder of how the best poetry does so much more. The poems in Creekwater Mansions are big hearted but never sentimental, always true to their time and place. Nevertheless, what I admire most is the sheer *aliveness* of the language, the unanticipated words or similes that reward multiple readings. I doubt a better debut book of poetry will be published this year. - Ron Rash, author of Serena Creekwater Mansions is wry and wise and smart-as-hell. If Tyler Childers could have studied under Robert Penn Warren, if James Still could have fallen in love with Nick Offerman, then maybe someone else could have written this book. As it stands, only the erudite mud dauber Ian Hall could have given us a debut so masculo-mythic, it ruins grit lit. Hear ye, hear ye: Hall is an indispensable new writer of Appalachia. - Rebecca Gayle Howell, author of American Purgatory Prepare yourself for a transporting journey into the Appalachian South with all its beauty and decay, its radiance and self-destructive tendencies. The portraits of family members, friends, and assorted locals are especially rich and haunting, rendered with incredible depth, dimension, and feeling. Ian Hall has the ear and timing of a jazz master and the daring of a successful transporter of moonshine.&n

Author Information

Ian Hall was born and reared in the coalfields of Southeastern Kentucky. He holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and he is currently a PhD candidate in English at Florida State University. He appeared on Narrative Magazine's '30 Below 30' list, and he was named a finalist for the X.J. Kennedy Prize, the Tennessee Williams Festival Poetry Contest, and the Kentucky State Poetry Society's Grand Prix Contest. His work is featured in numerous publications, including Narrative, Mississippi Review, The Journal, and American Literary Review. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida.

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