Cherokee Road Kill, the third collection of poetry from Celia Bland ’85, will be published in February 2018 by Dr. Cicero Books. Set in the 1970s in the Great Smokey Mountains of North Carolina, these poems describe the inhabitants of this isolated place, and in a series called “Bird Bone,” a woman killed by her lover. Artist Kyoko Miyabe’s numerous pen and ink drawings correspond with individual poems, presenting detailed and sometimes metaphorized elements from the text. In the book’s introduction, poetry editor Robert Kelly, writes: “These poems do not turn their backs on the places from which they come, and they don’t obsess, either. They move with deftness, forgiving and lamenting and adoring what happens, but quick, quick. I read them admiring the nimble social alertness of the writer, able from all sorts of human actions, interactions, to extract and express the moment —which is momentum— of their keenest meaning.”
Filed under: