The Dead Always Stay by Katlin Brock
Katlin Brock is a 30 year old from Harlan, Kentucky. She has a BA in English lit. from Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tennessee. This is her first book.
Advanced Praise :
In Katlin Brock’s brilliant collection The Dead Always Stay, classical literature and “Appalachia’s soft peaks” collide--leaving a “scope of wonders” that include Apollo slouching in a church pew, Dionysus sitting under a rainbow of neon beer signs, and Hermes loosing his shoes as they fly over the powerline. In this wholly original and refreshing take on the landscape, Zeus is a limousine bull, among other things, and in Demeter’s winter “not one thing grows except the sorrow in my bones.” Moreover, the narrator's papaw sees visions and wins a purple heart at the battle of Troy. In these pages, Brock creates a new and vivid mythology equal to both the history of the gods and these high mountains full of legends, where here giants dragged “their big hands to make the valleys where 221 runs in both directions.” These poems surprise and seduce, one after the other after the other. They both delight and break your heart. A stunning accomplishment. A feat of imagination. Brock is a strong new voice in Appalachian letters.
-- Darnell Arnoult, author of Galaxie Wagon and Incantations
“The place between Earth and Hades is a coalmine,” says Katlin Brock, peopling the Appalachian mountains where she was raised with the ancient gods of Mount Olympus. Brock’s is a landscape where Zeus is a bull in a Kentucky field, Dionysus drinks Busch Light while listening to Outlaw Country, and Demeter follows the signs to plant corn and beans. These poems shine light on the universal within our oldest stories, while also enshrining the mountain South. Read the poems in The Dead Always Stay, and you’ll see Appalachia’s coalfields and farmland in a completely new way.
-- Denton Loving, author of Tamp and Crimes Against Birds