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The Tillable Land
"The Tillable Land is a heart-racing, heart-breaking lyric, a liberating coming of age for our stunted relationship to all that feeds us."-Rebecca Gayle Howell, Author of American Purgatory and Render/An Apocalypse and Poetry Editor, Oxford American
In The Tillable Land, Melva Sue Priddy's poetry tells the story of a girlhood made of both land and family in midcentury Kentucky. There is a growing up and a coming of age in these poems. Part memoir-in-verse, part praise song, The Tillable Land-through the story of one woman's hard-won Kentucky life and the physical and emotional work of growing up close to the land in a man's world-reminds us that it is possible to be both a farmer and a woman and that healing can be found in both the earth and the power of Mother Nature within us. "Priddy makes brilliant use of the repetitive, braiding form of the villanelle to convey the relentless cycles of farm work. But somehow, amid this punishing labor, 'another god spoke with [her] . . . and words songed through [her] veins'. She never let go of that singing, and now she offers it to us." George Ella Lyon, Kentucky Poet Laureate, 2015-2016, author of Back to the Light
In The Tillable Land, Melva Sue Priddy's poetry tells the story of a girlhood made of both land and family in midcentury Kentucky. There is a growing up and a coming of age in these poems. Part memoir-in-verse, part praise song, The Tillable Land-through the story of one woman's hard-won Kentucky life and the physical and emotional work of growing up close to the land in a man's world-reminds us that it is possible to be both a farmer and a woman and that healing can be found in both the earth and the power of Mother Nature within us. "Priddy makes brilliant use of the repetitive, braiding form of the villanelle to convey the relentless cycles of farm work. But somehow, amid this punishing labor, 'another god spoke with [her] . . . and words songed through [her] veins'. She never let go of that singing, and now she offers it to us." George Ella Lyon, Kentucky Poet Laureate, 2015-2016, author of Back to the Light
128 pages, Paperback
First published April 19, 2022
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May 24, 2023
This book took me to a cliff I wasn't sure I could look off of. But it was worth the hand-dirtying effort to accompany Priddy against a strange but also familiar landscape.
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