Through All Seasons
In Through All Seasons, award-winning poet Julia Nunnally Duncan turns her clear, unflinching eye toward the landscape and community she has called home for a lifetime. The collection opens with a powerful sequence on Hurricane Helene, the devastating 2024 storm that reshaped the mountains of Western North Carolina-rivers turned to rubble, churches flooded, neighbors and strangers alike reaching out in acts of raw, urgent kindness. These poems don't look away from loss, but they also refuse to let go of hope, culminating in the region's hard-won motto: Mountain Strong.
From there, the book turns inward and backward, into tender, plainspoken memories of a 1960s mill-town childhood-a father's pocket knives, a mother's glass knick-knacks, a beloved horse named Thunder, friends who drifted away and never returned. These poems sit with nostalgia honestly, admitting its ache alongside its warmth, and confronting aging, memory, and the quiet grief of a hometown that keeps changing without you.
The collection closes in the natural world of the poet's own yard and hills: a mischievous Australian shepherd, a menagerie of squirrels with names and personalities, a red-tailed hawk trained and set free, and a flock of crows she's come to think of as friends. Here the book's title comes fully into focus-an argument, gently made, that faith and steadiness must carry us through every season, whether it brings flood, fire, or the first green of spring.
Duncan's poems are spare, direct, and deeply rooted in place-ideal for readers of Appalachian literature, regional poetry, nature writing, and memoir-in-verse. Fans of Ron Rash, Robert Morgan, and other Western North Carolina writers will find a kindred voice here.
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