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IN THE COUNTRY OF HARD LIFE AND ROSEBUDS

IN THE COUNTRY OF HARD LIFE AND ROSEBUDS

$20.00Price

ISBN: 979-8-9890965-0-3

Pub Date: Spring 2024

Pages: 80


By Anna Leigh Knowles


WINNER OF THE IDAHO PRIZE FOR POETRY 2023


Using family myth as navigation, the poems within In The Country of Hard Life and Rosebuds rotate between lyric pastorals and narrative forms. The speaker attempts to trace her identity along a timeline and family who remain geographically separate. In doing so, the poems echo toward the past for answers that stand indefinable in the present. The collection weaves a story of family, love, and the inevitability of the kind of loss experienced by rootlessness.


Anna Leigh Knowles’ collection In the Country of the Hard Life and Rosebuds is a fulsome elegy of substantial power. The book is personal-historical discovery and a series of resurrections, with Louisville, Kentucky as setting—it reads like a novella, cinematic and peopled by memorable characters. Knowles’ work is a gathering of tender, beyond-wise descriptions of Appalachia and its citizenry: “The heartache music helps him remember who he is.” In the Country of the Hard Life and Rosebuds will win you over as poems resonate with stories of finding joy and love and connectedness in a land of considerable heartbreak. In her words, “they come from the hope / I was honed in, and I lean into it / hard enough, layers of their clothes / rustle from decades ago.”

—Roy Bentley, Final Judge for the Idaho Prize 2023


    In deliberate, scintillating fashion Anna Leigh Knowles looks at land, life, and the constellations of family that inhabit both. She finds in them a difficult world of “half-finished history,” a world in which “all human truths outlast their own decorations.”  These hard-driving poems show us what language can do when we apply it to a world vanishing before our eyes.

    —Jackson Holbert


    In her muscular sophomore collection, Anna Leigh Knowles weaves poems of ambitious scale and impeccably granular detail to depict what, in the annals of fine art, has almost always been an overlooked, even a maligned Kentucky culture. These are not poems of the whisky gentry, or of frilled Derby hats, but of pig-hearted uncles, of Miller Lite prophecies, of semi-trucks down-shifting outside the local Kroger. Knowles deploys a stunning variety of lyric forms, which range from tightly wrung, visually dense poems to ones that explode the very field of the page. And while they depict overt and, more often, muted or pastoralized violence, the poems of In the Country of Hard Life and Rosebuds also find beauty in these scenes—not in violence per se, but in the cleft mettle and difficult perseverance of the people found therein.

    —John James


    Anna Leigh Knowles is the author of Conditions of The Wounded (Wisconsin Poetry Series, 2021). Her work appears in Blackbird, The Missouri Review Online, Tin House, and others. She has received honors from the Illinois Arts Council Agency and the W.B. Yeats Society of New York. She holds an MFA from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. Knowles lives and teaches in Denver, Colorado.

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