Kettle Bottom

Winner of the 2004 Perugia Press Prize, as well as the 2008 Thomas and Lillie D. Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing, Kettle Bottom was named an American Booksellers Association Book Sense Top Ten Poetry Book for 2005. It also was the Ohioana Library Association Poetry Book of the Year, and a finalist for the Weatherford Award of the Appalachian Studies Association. It was selected for inclusion in The Pushcart Prize XXX:Best of the Small Presses.

Based on the historical and social events of the West Virginia coal mine wars of 1920-1921, Kettle Bottom imagines the stories of miners, their wives, children, sisters, and mothers; of mountaineers, Italian immigrants, and Black families. These people organized for safe working conditions in opposition to the mine company owners and their agents. Fisher listened closely and the result is a book of vivid, rhythmic, heartfelt poems that address a violent time with honesty, levity, and compassion. Kettle Bottom is about how a community lived in the presence of constant danger and the choices the residents made. These are people to look to today.