Voices from the Appalachian Coalfields (Appalachian Writing: Working Lives)

Interview Poems by Mike and Ruth Yarrow, Photographs by Douglas Yarrow/.../



Voices from the Appalachian Coalfields is a powerful, compelling collection. The “found” poems of the miners and their spouses along with the photographs of mines and miners combine to bring its readers into the mining community, to feel the challenges of the work, mentally and physically, on the miners and their personal lives. The Yarrows have done a great service by compiling and editing these interviews into poems. These voices have a lot to say about mining life specifically, but also about work and love, and how we all try to balance those things in our daily lives. Their clarity and authenticity, their authority and earned wisdom, and above all, their passion, demand our attention. ~Jim Daniels, author of Eight Mile High: Stories and Apology to the Moon: Poems