Ain’t the Land is a collection of place-rooted poems that moves through Appalachia town by town, exploring weather, memory, labor, family, faith, hunger, animals, old speech, and stubborn grief. Were there any poets or other writers who influenced your work on this collection?

That’s a great question. The first poet that I latched on to during this process of writing the poems was Cynthia Cruz. Her poem “Sparks, Nevada,” published in the May 2014 issue of Poetry Magazine, really floored me. I didn’t discover it until several years afterwards, and I’m not even sure how I came by it, but the imagery, the dream-scape, the sense of loss and mistaken, even unavoidable tragedy stayed with me, and I decided to write an imitation poem titled “Unaka Springs, Tennessee.” A few years later, I found Richard Hugo’s essay, “Triggering Towns,” while doing research for my thesis on the underappreciated yet immense 20th-century Tennessee poet, George Scarbrough. Hugo’s essay explores the importance of the strange town in releasing the poet’s imagination to free language from emotional attachment. And I figured I had been through many of these towns, yet they weren’t my hometown, so I based these poems on what I remembered of the towns, and they sparked my memories from other places, my own family. It really became a sort of visual remembrance in a persona’s voice mingled, as these ventures are, with what Margalit Fox called “the hazy place where truth, fiction, and memory meet.” Maybe because I had just completed my thesis on Scarbrough, I also began to stray from Cruz’s line structuring and utilize what I found in Scarbrough’s poems: embedded classic ballad meter in loosely structured stanza poems. Finally, I was reading E. B. Miles’ naturalist study, Our Southern Birds, and also reading a lot of English ballads recorded in the Southern mountains from the early 20th century during the writing of all 52 poems.

Faith appears throughout the collection, sometimes as comfort and sometimes as something to wrestle with. How has your own spiritual life influenced your poetry?

Oh, I’d say religious imagery is very real and palpable to me, and using it in poetry helps me to understand, or better yet, envision these mythical scenes from antiquity in our century so insistent on the “now.” I remember using the Ezekiel Wheel—that old trope—in a poem (I think it’s “Shouns, Tennessee”), and of course the religious symbolism is clear yet mystical—the Holy Ghost at the center of life (of matter) like a wheel spinning within a wheel. I don’t know why I like re-imagining these mythical scenes from my religion, but I guess it has to do with context, and I guess my poetry is asking, “Is God here?” I remember growing up and singing these famous hymns with elevated scenes of the risen lamb, like stuff out of Revelation. I was stumped. I didn’t want to sing a lie, so my dad recommended that I use my imagination. That helped. I stopped worrying about whether what I sang was what I believed; I started singing to see. I’m trying to just answer off the cuff, like I was hearing you ask me these questions, and this middling attempt may be the best I can offer right now, but it’s a relief to get a question about spirituality as a viable influence on the writing of a poem. An editor once told me that some of the poems in this series were “speculative” because they included religious tropes, and I was tickled pink. Spiritual reality is about as separate from material reality as water systems are “separate” from the land, but I guess we don’t always engage in the less visible systems with fear and trembling.

How did you decide the order of the poems, and did you want readers to experience them as a journey through Appalachia?

I took the cue for the poems’ organization from their form. I figured I had pairs of lines in couplets, so I should look for echoes between poems and join them up in a sort of journey through the seasons in three series or years. Since the book was mostly drafted in a three-year period, there are several distinct groups of poems on the same season yet with different tones. Yet the poems are not chronological, maybe chthonological–organized by earth, not time. So, there endf up being “pairings” throughout the collections—poems in close proximity with similar topics, images, referents, etc. As I was submitting the poems to periodicals and literary magazines, I started to notice how I was favoring the idea of certain of them going toward the front or toward the end, and so on. A friend and great poet, Jesse Graves, recommended that the poem “Duffield, Virginia” be the first poem, and I liked that idea, so I did it. He said that the highway scene of the poem would complement the tone of the book—vignettes or visitations. The reader is more like the pilgrim in contrast to the voices in the poems, which are staid. I wouldn’t call this a tour. Many of the places included in the book aren’t what you might call destinations—out of the way for many, even dyed-in-the-wool Appalachians.

What do you hope readers who have never visited Appalachia will come away understanding after reading Ain’t the Land?

​I have to remind myself that I’m not an Appalachian poet writing poetry to advance the region or its customs. I’m a poet above all else, and the poem is the ends and the means, but in many ways, these poems are more rural or remote. That being said, a lot of my neighbors are thoughtful people, but they don’t always think about things that have broad appeal to “average” Americans (of course, this is just my impression after watching the nightly news these some odd years). So, I guess you could say that the concerns or topics of the poems don’t have broad appeal. If someone struggles to feel relevant when they journey through arcanus, they would do well to spare themselves from my little book. However, if a reader enjoys the occasional break from our self-obsessed, technocratic, newfangled age, then these poems may have something to offer. A friend of mine told me that he likes to go to the woods for fun to bike, camp, hike, you name it, and he told me that when he read these town poems, he was “in the woods,” which is the sort of compliment that I am sure I will never be able to fully fathom or appreciate.

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