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WHAT IT DONE TO US

WHAT IT DONE TO US

$18.00Price

ISBN: 978-0-9968584-6-5

Pub Date: Feb. 2017

Pages: 68


By Essy Stone


WINNER OF THE IDAHO PRIZE FOR POETRY 2016


What It Done to Us, by Essy Stone, is a poetry of narrative tension, sense of place, and with a wide-angle scan of lyrical language. There is a landscape here, the depiction of Appalachia, a beautiful backdrop of loves and struggles with violence, poverty and all its minions such as drugs and crime, and its religion. Stone has created a southern gothic for today . . . a testament, a collection that could be the mythology that we find at the intersection of flesh and spirit, or maybe it’s the reveal to a hard-times question like, “Why does the Devil get here faster than God every time?” This is a tough community that Stone, with a deft touch of empathy and eloquence, shows us, and we begin to know these folk. These poems are understated but highly charged vignettes from the hollers, a shadow world of the embattled folk who bear up and just do what needs done without apology. This is a stunning debut collection, and it is our introduction to an amazing poet, Essy Stone.

—Gary Copeland Lilley, Final Judge for the Idaho Prize for Poetry 2016

    Memorable Fancy III.

    The Angel spake unto me & said, how did you recover?

    Did the sense just go away?

    or spread in dust-storms like pulverized stone

    or spread in droplets as though through osmosis

    Californians, the helpful ones, acknowledge some bad trips

    exist on earth even among colorwashed sunsets

    fault lines with potential to swallow whole legislatures

    my daddy’s hell lacks imagination

    so damn him, let him suffer with the rest of us

    Ophelia-everymen, just drowning in it

    I am sorry for my sins

    I do not believe in God—


    —Essy Stone


    Essy Stone recently completed a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Miami, but spent most of her life as a waitress in East Tennessee. Her poems have been published in Prairie Schooner, 32 Poems, and The New Yorker.

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