Author, activist, feminist, teacher, and artist bell hooks is celebrated as one of the nation's leading intellectuals. Born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, hooks drew her unique pseudonym from the name of her grandmother, an intelligent and strong-willed African American woman who inspired her to stand up against a dominating and repressive society. Her poetry, novels, memoirs, and children's books reflect her Appalachian upbringing and feature her struggles with racially integrated schools and unwelcome authority figures. One of Utne Reader 's "100 Visionaries Who Can Change Your Life," hooks has won wide acclaim from critics and readers alike. In Appalachian Elegy , bell hooks continues her work as an imagist of life's harsh realities in a collection of poems inspired by her childhood in the isolated hills and hidden hollows of Kentucky. At once meditative, confessional, and political, this poignant volume draws the reader deep into the experience of living in Appalachia. Touching on such topics as the marginalization of its people and the environmental degradation it has suffered over the years, hooks's poetry quietly elegizes the slow loss of an identity while also celebrating that which is constant, firmly rooted in a place that is no longer whole. Path-breaking writer, teacher, and intellectual hooks continues mining her memories of her childhood in the Kentucky hills and her reflections on the ties between African Americans and the land. These subjects shape her essay collection, Belonging: A Culture of Place (2008). Here she turns to poetry, as she did in When Angels Speak of Love (2007), specifically the elegy, to mourn what was lost when black farmers were forced off their land and to celebrate what can be reclaimed. In this book-length cycle ofpoems about history, family, cultivation, and nature, hooks writes of “ancestral rights / to turn the ground over”; of the “earth that is all at once a grave / a resting place a bed of new beginnings / avalanche of splendor”; and of bloodshed and healing, “toil and torment,” mud, crops, wildflowers, and swans. Sown with images of rain and fertility, captive animals and enslaved people, “grass beyond green” and the ravages of coal mining, hooks’ distilled lyrics possess the weight of stones in a foundation and logs in a cabin even as they sing and soar. --Donna Seaman Winner of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association's Best Poetry Award for 2013 "The collection reflects aesthetic and linguistic choices based on the thinking and feeling of someone who has made important contributions to contemporary thought and who thinks and feels deeply about what Kentucky – as 'here' and home – means to her."―Edwina Pendarvis, Professor Emeritus at Marshall University and author of Like the Mountains of China " Appalachian Elegy has the heft and expressiveness of a unified book; it is not merely a collection of poems, but a book of poems that accumulates meaning and pathos, wisdom and grief, as it proceedsThat is a quality I desire in all poetry, and Appalachian Elegy supplies it with a kind of incantation and dance that I find deeply satisfying."―Maurice Manning, finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and winner of the 2000 Yale Younger Poets award "bell hooks is one of our most important dissidents. Here she radically reinvisions the history of Kentucky, lowering a plumb line of stark and insistent language into the depths of Appalachia. Her poetry seeks to unearth suppressed communities, to recover a vital sensibility, 'until history/rewritten resurrected/returns to its rightful owners.' hooks forces us to hear her 'fierce, deep grief' for, and attachment to, Appalachia; if we listen we will be the richer for it."―Naomi Wallace, Naomi Wallace "'I will guide you' bell hooks promises, and delivers, in her remarkable collection Appalachian Elegy. In meditations intimate and clear, with 'radical grace,' she negotiates 'beauty and danger,' the animal and human worlds, the pain of history, the dead and the living. With wisdom and courage, she moves through lamentation to resurrection, the worlds she unearths an 'avalanche of splendor.'"―Paula Bohince, author of The Children an d Edge of Bayonet Wood s "Readers who know and love bell hooks will discover the source of her strength. New readers will find a unique voice and the universal strength of our natural world. All of us will find the wild within ourselves."―Gloria Steinem "Hush arbors were safe places in the deep woods where slaves could commune with each other to lift their choral voices to the heavens as they tarried for freedom. bell hooks comes from a people who deeply connected with this country's 'backwoods' and hills in Kentucky and decided to stead in these spaces. Tending and tilling the land that afforded them independence and the freedom to unmask in isolation. They were 'renegades and rebels' who didn't seek to civilize Kentucky's wilds, instead developing a besidedness with the land that i