Kathryn Hunt

The Country I Come From Kathryn Hunt

Plainspoken and unflinching, woven from "scraps and rumors, whispers and imaginings," these intimate poems chronicle a violent and troubled history on the North American Plains and the lives of white and indigenous family members, the living and the dead, and their relationships to one another and to the land.

The Country I Come From celebrates the harsh and enduring beauty of the vast grasslands and its inhabitants, beginning in a time before time when life "woke from Nothing into This: An incandescence of meteors." The poems are drenched in wonderment and silence, miseries and mysteries, and the stubborn cargo of our individual and collective histories. Eschewing the myths of the Old West, The Country I Come From reimagines the stories of women and men for whom few records were kept, honors their lives, and explores the nature of desire, loss, and belonging.

The Country I Come From is a sung hymn to the good earth, and a mourning prayer. The poems are meant to heal, and they do.-Lauren Davis, Home Beneath the Church and The Missing Ones

These poems look across the wide ranges of the land in its fullness and haunt the ordinary fabric of our lives. They carve an enduring two-track road through our existence.-Diane Glancy, The Dream of a Broken Field and Island of the Innocent: a Consideration of the Book of Job