The Whited Air: Mary Paul in Winter by Susie Paul

The Whited Air is a beautifully imagined, deeply thought, thorough, and affecting portrait of a young woman moving away from a hard life on the farm and making a life by herself in the hard world of the textile mills of nineteenth-century Massachusetts. In the mill, privation and regulation are tempered by the gratifications of supporting herself in “the whited air.”

–Andrew Hudgins, Harper Lee Award winner, author of After the Lost War, Ecstatic in the Poison

Susie Paul’s The Whited Air sings with the historically imagined and heartbreaking life of Mary Paul, a young 19th century textile mill worker who wants more. She longs for a life all her own, for green in white New England winters. This is Mary Paul’s story, as well as the story for women in America since European colonization. Susie Paul gives us achingly beautiful poems of both imagistic and narrative power and invites us to see the snow and fabric lint storms that attempt to cover over the lives of women facing the hard winters of their geographies, their place in history, and their options for working and living as women. The poems reckon with Mary Paul’s and fellow worker Brigid’s struggle for independence and self-reliance in a world holding women in positions of service to men.

–Katherine D. Perry, author of Long Alabama Summer