Incomer

Incomer is a story in poetry about falling in love-with life, with change, with the rural hills of the mid-Appalachians, with the challenge of living close to the land, and with possibility. "Take a kid who grew up in a city, put her / next to a pond with a pole, and soon enough, / she will catch a fish and not know what to do / with it." It swirls with birds, seasons, persistence, and the aching hunger to find belonging. Present dangers and sharp memories of past wounds weave in and out as the poet sets down roots and persists, foot to the ground, in a strange new place that becomes beloved. Meanwhile, the poet grieves the cost of disconnection as her mother's illness and death bring her back to what she left when she moved away from the familiar.

Bonnie Proudfoot's poems all have a strong pulse, alive with hope and the possibility of transcendence; she climbs through thickets of joys and hardships, growing stronger, understanding more about her chosen home along the way. She questions whether she's "grafted to something native," becoming part of the land and animals and people under assault by corporate greed, by environmental changes, by societal fractures. An understanding-of self, of place, of yearning and loss-intertwines with the landscapes and seasons of the Appalachian region.