The sixty-three fiction writers and poets within this anthology delve deep into the many senses of place that modern West Virginia, the core of Appalachia, inspires. Throughout this collection, we see profound wonder, questioning, and conflicts involving family, sexual identity, class, discrimination, environmental beauty, and peril, and all the sorts of rebellion, error, contemplation, and contentment that an intrepid soul can devise. These stories and poems, all published within the last fifteen years, are grounded in what it means to live in and identify with a complex place. With a mix of established writers like Jayne Anne Phillips, Norman Jordan, Ann Pancake, Maggie Anderson, and Denise Giardina and fresh voices like Matthew Neil Null, Ida Stewart, Rajia Hassib, and Scott McClanahan, this collection breaks open new visions of all-American landscapes of the heart. By turns rowdy and contemplative, hilarious and bleak, and lyrical and gritty, it is a collage of extraordinary literary visions.

A Life Above Water is a cycle of poems that examines both the natural and human worlds and explores the boundaries between the two. The manuscript is concerned with personal ecologies and mythologies the ways that things are interconnected and the stories that we create to explain those connections. The manuscript is arranged in three concentric sections, each subsequent division nesting within the previous one. The reader is drawn into the broad, inclusive view of All These Indigestible Parts with its focus on the animals of the forest and birds of the air, the apparent cruelty of the natural world and that which is human about the animal through Fellowship and Baked Goods which looks at peopled communities and the ways we interact with one another, to the tighter, more personal focus of The Great Slowing and its themes of loss, shortcoming and redemption. The poems are individually free-standing and complete, but taken as a whole form a broad yet detailed portrait of the world around us and our place within it. By turns analytical, scientific, lyrical, whimsical and spiritual, A Life Above Water is a book that fits neatly into the canon of contemporary poetry while offering a unique, fresh and accessible perspective.