Beauty Strip: Poems (The TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series)

Beauty Strip: Poems (The TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series)

The TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series: Tennessee Beauty Strip considers the landscapes and living things of Appalachia, protests the industrialization that leaves ruin in its wake, and celebrates the human capacity to remake, redeem, and find shelters and homes. Part sketchbook, part dreambook, Beauty Strip maps and ruminates on, haunts and is haunted by, the mountaintop removal sites and mill towns, the salt-works and bloomeries, that have scarred the land from West Virginia to Virginia to Tennessee. WILLIAM KELLEY WOOLFITT is a resident of Cleveland, Tennessee. He has worked as a camp counselor, bookseller, ballpark peanuts vendor, and teacher of computer literacy to senior citizens. He holds a BA from Fairmont State University, an MA from Hollins University, and an MFA and PhD from Pennsylvania State University. Our Lady of the Mills   The painter dodges the filthy clumps, despises their chilblained faces, rabbit-eyes, broken teeth. He eases into the stone church, the one work he will give them: the virgin, charcoal-lined, comfort for the people in their hours at the furnace and the spools.   With paregoric and tonic bitters, he endures the church’s stained light, cold arches, and eye-sockets. Empty, unpainted, the dreadful ovals will tell what she felt when she touched her son, cool and rigid as marble awaiting the chisel, pale as threadbare muslin, spilt cream.