Every River on Earth: Writing from Appalachian Ohio ed. by Neil Carpathios

Abstract

Reviewed by: Every River on Earth: Writing from Appalachian Ohio ed. by Neil Carpathios Shea Daniels Neil Carpathios, ed., Every River on Earth: Writing from Appalachian Ohio. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015. 176 pp. $47.95. As a young Appalachian woman so much of the writing I encounter from and about the region pulsates with contemporary geopolitics, pulsates with a strong desire to convey this particular place, to capture this particular Ohio. In this sense, the collection of poems and short stories in “Every River on Earth: Writing from Appalachian Ohio” is a torch song. These stories and poems moor themselves on experience, on a love of a [End Page 95] place. From that love of place come ruminations on inequality, stories of a deadly accident, and dirges on outmigration. Many of these writers crave universality, hoping it will bring economic possibility or credibility. Tf they can find the right words to ground folks who haven’t grown up in these foothills, they seem to think, they can take back some measure of regional power or dignity, disarm the rhetoric of geopolitics. They hope they can subvert the importance of modernity and replace its importance in ways that make sense here, in this Appalachia, in this Ohio. Yet like the old men in my town who refuse to call our factories by their current corporate names, our best writers understand the universal is most aptly conveyed in the singular. Donald Ray Polluck’s “The Jesus Lights” watches a couple bring their dead son’s car home to rust in the front yard. Christina Jones’s “The Last Shot” explores the complexity of ruin. Joel Peckham’s “Psalm 96” soapboxes the intricacy of sorrow. Throughout these poems and stories almost as much attention is paid to our land as to plot and character, from sycamore trees and foothills to the exploded hillsides lining our highways. And throughout these stories and poems, much like throughout these foothills, the land itself empowers and limits these plots and characters. They are intertwined and interdependent and, as this is writing from the Appalachian foothills, it simply could not be any other way. I grew up reading voraciously. So few of those voices explored what it meant to resolutely love a place at times unloved and feared by others. So few of those characters had the same valleys in their vowels as my Ohio. Later folks told me little writing came from Appalachia, like these foothills were something landlocked and barren. But like this anthology represents, these foothills are the furthest thing from landlocked. Every single river on earth leads right back to them. [End Page 96] Shea Daniels Ohio University Athens, Ohio Copyright © 2018 Paul Mokrzycki Renfro