Salt: Poems of Appalachian Roots

by Amber D. Tran

Dedicated to blue-collar lifestyles and family secrets, Salt: Poems of Appalachian Roots pays homage to those born and raised in the Appalachia and to those familiar with the tribulations that come with poverty and failure. Combined with historic photographs by Lewis Hine, Doris Ulmann, Russell Lee, and others, this book exposes the depth and burden of personal and social struggles found among people in the Appalachia, but also offers a glimpse into their stalwart dedication to persevere.

96 pages, Paperback

Published May 29, 2018

About the author

Born and raised in the heart of the Appalachia, Amber spent her childhood growing up on gravel roads and playing Pokémon Red on her Game Boy Color. At the age of 10, she discovered her fascination with creative writing and turned a 1-page homework assignment into a 35-page document for her 5th grade teacher. Less than a year later, she wrote her very first book about a female basketball player with leukemia. She will spare you the pain from having to read it.

After graduating Magna Cum Laude from West Virginia University in 2012 with a bachelor’s degree in English literature and a concentration in creative writing, Amber moved to northern Alabama. She married her husband after meeting him in a Dragon Ball Z chat room. She is currently employed as a senior technical writer and Scrum Master for a software company. In her free time, she enjoys playing TERA, League of Legends, and Dungeons & Dragons.

Her award-winning debut novel Moon River was released in September.

She is featured in multiple literary journals, magazines, and anthologies around the world. Her work can be found in The Icarus Anthology, Cheat River Review, HeartWood Literary Magazine, The Stray Branch, Memoir Mixtapes, and Sidereal Magazine.

Amber currently lives in Alabama with her husband and two dogs, Ahri and Ziggs.

Reviews

[Khristina Chess · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Salt, Amber Tran presents a haunting collection of poems that at once seem both personal and communal—providing a stark look at themes of family, death, drug abuse, sexual abuse, poverty, and loss in the Appalachia region she once called home. The recurrence of “salt” in the poems shows up a tears, as sweat, as seasoning in the bland food of a starving people. The black and white photographs compliment the poems to show a hard landscape and the faces of its people. Some of these poems broke open my heart, like The First Time I Sinned, which sets the tone for the book, or The Doll House. Tran’s writing is lovely, insightful, and worth savoring.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

I couldn't turn away. Once these poems motioned me over and whispered their sad, salty secrets in my ear, I was entranced. I was losing myself in these poems, tumbling into them only to emerge covered in the dust of their tragedy. These poems will stay with me. Tran deploys heart-breaking concrete detail balanced expertly with beautiful, mysterious abstractions. The effect was to provide enough detail to anchor the poems firmly in the hard clay of their Appalachian soil while also mysteriously hinting at the ungraspable, eternal depths of the unspeakable tragedies perpetrated there. Ultimately, this deft balancing of detail and suggestion is what propelled these poems beyond the solipsistic confessional mode of half a century ago. The speaker, in the end, wasn't the protagonist of the poems; "The Appalachia" became the protagonist to haunting, moving effect.