Work Is Love Made Visible: Collected Family Photographs and Poetry

Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

Both homespun and sophisticated, this book of poems and family memories carries a bite: the author is an Oklahoma woman with a history of hard traveling and a feminist intellectual with a formidable critical vocabulary. She writes in a language of solidarity, affirmation, and love. The story of the daughter who left home, traveled the country, and returned to do her family proud is still worth telling: add to that the heartbreak, lustiness, traditional wisdom, Okie determination, and Indian legacy of these poems and you have quite a bundle. The historic family photographs are breathtaking in their own right: beyond any job of archaeology, they speak the world they portray.

"This wonderful book of poetry by an Oklahoma native is a must-have for any reader that enjoys good writing about Oklahoma rural life as experienced by a working class family."--The Oklahoma Observer

Jeanetta Calhoun Mish is a native Oklahoman who returned home after twenty years to complete her PhD in American Literature and grow good tomatoes. Her prize-winning chapbook Tongue Tied Woman appeared in 2002, and she has published recently in poetry magazines and anthologies as well as LABOR: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas.

West End Press

5.5 x 8.5 72 pages 13 halftones