Rooted in places like Watauga County, Goshen Creek, and Dismal Mountain,
the poems in Ron Rash's fourth collection, Waking, electrify dry
counties and tobacco fields until they sparkle with the rituals and
traditions of Southerners in the stir of their lives. In his first book
of poetry in nearly a decade, Rash leads his readers on a Southern
odyssey, full of a terse wit and a sense of the narrative so authentic
it will dazzle you. As we wake inside these poems, we see rivers wild
with trout, lightning storms, and homemade churches, nailed and leaning
against the side of a Tennessee mountain. A two-time PEN/Faulkner Award
Finalist, Rash has been compared to writers like John Steinbeck and
Cormac McCarthy. With his eye for the perfect detail and an ear for
regional idiom, Rash furthers his claim as the new torchbearer for
literature in the American South. Here is a book full of sorrow and
redemption, sparseness and the beauty of a single, stark detail--the
muskellunge at first light, a barn choked with curing tobacco, a porch
full of men and the rockers that move them over the same spot until they
carve their names into the ground, deeper, even, into the roots where
myths start, into the very marrow of the world.
