Stones and Ghosts: Poems

By Doug Van Gundy

Around here, we keep our dead real close,
set them a place at table, keep buttermilk
in cartons at the back of the fridge for them.
--Excerpt from "The Way We Do Things"

This is a land of coal mines and of mourning lives lost because of those mines. Of mourning the mountains that the mines destroyed. This is a place where floods change the landscape and its people. Where streams are sacred. Where rivers rise and fall with amens. Here, sons make meaning out of cutting onions and watching lightning bugs. Families gather over guitars and gravesites. But what does it mean to love a place that does not always love you back?

In Stones and Ghosts, Doug Van Gundy reckons with his West Virginia. Using stunning natural imagery, Van Gundy creates a portrait of small-town central Appalachia, grappling with stereotypes about its culture, history, and people. The result is a tender and accessible poetry collection that lingers between the hurtful half-truths of ignorance, poverty, and xenophobia and the pro-labor, nature-loving, live-and-let-live utopia at the center of Van Gundy's personal mythology.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1985905728
• ISBN13: 9781985905726
• Release Date: July 2027
• Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
• Length: 96 Pages
• Weight: 0.52 lbs.
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher