Bent Cedar Mountain

"'Bent Cedar Mountain' takes us deep into the Appalachians (“They drove past the gas station / ...for five more miles of gravel / up Bent Cedar Mountain, / flanked thick with mountain laurel.”) and deeper into the lives of Grace and Nohl ('his wife held the boy’s body / close, held him for too many / minutes – until the silence in the room felt like something that would fill their lungs.') A novel in verse, this work by Julie Hensley traces the sad, poignant, and often violent lives of its protagonists, 'craving the weight of her hips, the scent of her unwashed hair, some sign / she is still real and alive, still his wife.' Caught between tradition and progress, their marriage unfurls like a fiddlehead fern in the mountain spring."