"Jeanetta Calhoun Mish speaks from the body, the core, and her own earth. Rarely will you find a collection more honest, more true, than this."--Kerry Cohen, author of Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity
In her third poetry collection Jeanetta Calhoun Mish sends war dispatches from home. She brings her unique perspective as a rural working-class Oklahoman, a descendant of defeated Southern supporters in the Civil War, and a first-generation college student seeking a new expressive life to writings that range from blank-verse ode to ghazal and flash memoir to narrative free verse.
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.
"There's a never-misty nostalgia and sometimes hard edge to these poems of a rough childhood, and an homage to the equally rough environs of Oklahoma. It's the sure hand of the writer that keeps you reading, the propulsive sense of a life happened, lived and recorded, with as much candor and skill as the best poetry offers us"--Rusty Barnes, author of Reckoning
"The power in these poems pitches, confessional and kindred like a puck along some pocked seam of red dirt clodded sanity. Grief-drenched, malady-reamed, and clumped up in some rancorous home front fault line ceremoniously split wide open, what proves revelatory, beyond Mish's poetic prowess, is her delivery of synchronicity in place and time--a sweet, sweet surrender."--Allison Adelle Hedge Coke author of Streaming