Reckonings : Poems

The deft, moving lyrics of Reckonings attempt to account for the slow violence of Appalachia''s industrialization – particularly its twin legacies of exploitative labor and toxic waste pollution – while also positioning us in meaningful relation to this violence, the "Risk published in the air" by corrupt corporations. It''s impossible work, making meaning out of the willful destruction of the working class and of the earth, but Ryan Walsh mounts a passionate defense of the too-often overlooked and devalued lives and landscapes of West Virginia. "Unincorporated? It was always corporate," Walsh asserts of the community where he grew up, and bears witness to a landscape and a people living beyond their own ruin. Far from hopeless, these powerful poems testify to the persistence of ordinary hopes despite injustice, and celebrate "this dark remaining/joy we take into our brief bodies."

There is a price for what may be considered progress. In his debut collection, centered around the cracked industrial-pastoral of Appalachia, Walsh asks who rung up the ecological tab and who will be implicated by this line of questioning. Above the banks of polluted rivers and decimated communities, a harvest of mountain and man; a bounty of pine and cellular tower has been reaped. There are those complicit in the sowing of such rewards, and through stunning syntax and mapping the bucolic’s role in the creation of present and future, Walsh asks if the means can justify the ends. Who is accountable when noble intentions irreparably wound the hidden corners of the Earth? Among these poems is a life lived in the shadow of technological progress and urban advantage. These poems plot the broken places, add topography to the image reflected in the shattered screen of a smart phone, and unite humanity in a shared culpability while also celebrating the perseverance and persistent beauty of the natural world.