On Phillips Creek by Natalie Kimbell

The poems from On Phillips Creek are born from a place that no longer exists except in the writer’s heart, and perhaps they are made stronger for being so well kept within that private landscape. And yet, On Phillips Creek is utterly familiar, especially to those of us in Appalachia who know how coal can be valued more than life, and how a family is built on generations of women who have always had to make hard choices. And how sometimes we look back at loss with gratitude.

–Denton Loving, author of Tamp

Natalie Kimbell, as poet, declares herself a “river of women’s stories,” a conduit for the voices of those who have gone on—a grandmother rescued from certain death by a miracle drug, an aunt who “singes the air” with kin-cursing, a father beloved despite his faults, even the deceased second wife of her former husband—and those still present—a mother, a granddaughter who earnestly pleads for her grandmother, who she thinks will soon join “the book of the dead,” to “tell the family my name … tell them I’m coming.” And so the poet does, tells us readers the names of those people and places that have formed her, that even now flow like a river, carrying her around bends where even more stories wait to be told.

–Connie Jordan Green, author of Slow Children and Regret Comes to Tea (both from Finishing Line Press), Household Inventory (winner of the Brick Road Poetry Prize), and Darwin’s Breath (Iris Press).

In this elegiac collection, Natalie Kimbell pays homage to both family and place rooted in the mountains of Virginia–a family and place she once longed to leave and now journeys back to in line and stanza. Poignant and passionate, these poems bring Phillip’s Creek to life–the characters and natural landscape of Kimbell’s birth and of her spirit. We are made passionate along with her as “mold of earth and time [thread] the air.”

–Darnell Arnoult, author of Galaxie Wagon and Incantations