Jessica Cory

Coming Soon!

Disposable
by Jessica Cory

ISBN: 9781962405805
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Jessica Cory is the editor of Appalachian Journal: A Regional Studies Review, published since 1972 at Appalachian State University. She holds a PhD in Native American, African American, and environmental literatures from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and is the editor of Mountains Piled upon Mountains: Appalachian Nature Writing in the Anthropocene (WVU Press, 2019) and the co-editor (with Laura Wright) of Appalachian Ecocriticism and the Paradox of Place (UGA Press, 2023). Her creative and scholarly writings have been published in the North Carolina Literary Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Northern Appalachia Review, and other fine publications.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

The poems in Disposable explore the value of labor and consumerism amid the Appalachian, American, and global late-stage Capitalocene. Moving between urban and rural landscapes through central and southern Ohio and across North Carolina, noting how plastic bags litter roadside ditches, how commuters form traffic jams, and how people behave toward service workers, these poems provide ways of looking at the world around us that disrupt economic powers and force us to think about what really matters.

ADVANCE PRAISE:

Jessica Cory’s splendid volume, Disposable, is nothing short of indispensable. Wry, wistful, brash and elegiac at once: the language of the fellaheen, a strident voice that echoes on occasion Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters, leavened with Muriel Rukeyser––the elegantly pissed-off swagger of someone born with an Appalachian-sized working-class chip on her shoulder and the language and bravado to transform outrage and Sisyphean shoulder-to-the-wheel labor into sonic transcendent language that beats a glory drum and never breaches a picket line. These poems have guts. Read them; listen to them––hurtling at you like an apocalyptic future, half lore, half Holy Writ, where folks “utter incantations in [their] bathroom mirrors” and “home is sacred.” Disposable is a knockout. Period.

––Joseph Bathanti, North Carolina Poet Laureate (2012-2014)
& author of Steady Daylight

Jessica Cory’s new chapbook Disposable pays homage to Appalachia’s labor class and the terrain from which they rise up, year in, year out, to earn a day’s wage. Each poem is brilliantly interwoven with red, white & blue truths, inspired by years lived within a region where ”Natty Light” is slang for Natural Light beer, and tire tracks intersect railroad tracks, battered landscapes, and lives. A place where, despite hardships, she and her neighbors don their suits / & dresses patterned with purple flowers every Sunday, same as their forebears, except this generation is practicing a gospel focused well beyond the puerile promise of a mansion in the sky, one in which like Moses, their fists [are] full & raised.

––Kari Gunter-Seymour, author of All That Teethes Within
& Executive Director, Women of Appalachia Project