Getting acquainted with local flora and fauna is the perfect way to begin to understand the wonder of nature. The natural environment of Southern Appalachia, with habitats that span the Blue Ridge to the Cumberland Plateau, is one of the most biodiverse on earth. A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia-- a hybrid literary and natural history anthology--showcases sixty of the many species indigenous to the region. Ecologically, culturally, and artistically, Southern Appalachia is rich in paradox and stereotype-defying complexity. Its species range from the iconic and inveterate--such as the speckled trout, pileated woodpecker, copperhead, and black bear--t ..

Winner of Weatherford Award for Best Poetry Book about Appalachia A poet acclaimed for uncompromising, honest poems that sound like no one else (The Rumpus ) now offers considerations of the natural world and humans' place within it in ecopoetry of both ambitious reach and elegant refinement Rose McLarney has won attention as a poet of impressive insight, craft, and a constantly questioning and enlarging vision (Andrew Hudgins). In her third collection, Forage , she continues to weave together themes she loves: home, heritage, the South, animals, water, the environment. These intricately sequenced poems take up everything from animals' symbolic roles in art ..

Set in the Appalachian landscape, Rose McLarney's debut collection, The Always Broken Plates of Mountains, gives voice to a chorus of speakers, who are at once plainspoken, reverent, and musical. "There is a tenderness that persists" as McLarney explores mountain land and those who live and love and lose on it, and what it means to be faithful--to oneself, to one's heritage, and to one another. ..

Selected as a winner of the National Poetry Series by Robert Wrigley Rose McLarney has won acclaim for image-rich poems that explore her native southern Appalachia and those who love and live and lose on it. Her second collection broadens these investigations in poems that examine the shape-shifting quality of memory, as seen in folktales that have traveled across oceans and through centuries, and in how we form recollections of our own lives. An opening sequence presents contemporary ghost stories: men who gather at dawn in the gas station parking lots of small towns; the mountain lion that paces the edge of a receding tree line. A middle section draws connec ..