Author Description

"Although it's one of the five largest of Kentucky's counties, Breckinridge County is one of the state's poorest. In his long poem 'Breckinridge County Suite,' Joe Bolton juxtaposes the potential fecundity of this lush green western Kentucky landscape with the inescapable dead-ending of its poverty--the repetition of living where the living is repetitious. Harsh winters and dying vegetation serve as his metaphors for a kind of despair and loss which the speaker of the poem supposes about the main character, an anonymous but representative 'young Kentucky woman.' In Bolton's poem, things happen in the dark, but the dark can be a place for both disappointment and discovery." --Rebecca Flannagan