Kettle Bottom

This award-winning, unforgettable collection is written in the voices of people living and working in the coal camps during the West Virginia mine wars of 1920-1921, featuring poems that illustrate how a community responded to a time of danger.

Written in the voices of people living and working in the coal camps during the West Virginia coal mine wars of 1920-1921, these vivid poems show how a community responded to a time of danger. KETTLE BOTTOM imagines the stories of miners, their wives, children, sisters, and mothers; of mountaineers, Italian immigrants, and African American families -- people who organized for safe working conditions in opposition to the mine company owners and their agents. The poet, Diane Gilliam, whose family was part of the Appalachian outmigration from Mingo County, West Virginia, and Johnson County, Kentucky, has created a book of poems that address a violent time with honesty, levity, and compassion. At its core, KETTLE BOTTOM is about how a community lived in the presence of multiple risks and the choices the residents made.

"Like the Michelangelo of her poem who 'cuts away everything from the stone that is not David, ' Diane Gilliam makes the stone of the West Virginia mountains yield up its human past, and gives a second, enduring life through her art to the people of her home place, who would otherwise be 'all gone under the hill.' Her community is fortunate to have harbored such a poet, and American poetry is the larger for this extraordinary book."--Eleanor Wilner

"Mining may be men's work, but the conditions of this work pervade their family lives. Their wives and children bear the fallout from the mines ... Gilliam] creates a self inside this history and makes this history personal. At the same time, she locates this self in a larger world, drawing on her family stories and culture to create a collective identity from this tragedy."--Teow Lim Goh, Tin House

"In KETTLE BOTTOM, Diane Gilliam probes the emotional truth of coal camp history, and then extracts it--holds its darkness in the light of her brilliant lines."--Joyce Dyer

"Students immediately engaged with the poems; faculty found the poems a productive way of exploring issues of class, of race, of history and who gets to tell it, of suffering, of moral choice, and of resilience."--Carol Christ, President of Smith College

Poetry. History. Family & Relationships. Women's Studies.