Books

To request a signed copy of a book from the author, please get in touch.

Rubble Masonry (LSU Press, 2026)

Rubble Masonry is a collection of lyric essays that takes its title from the practice of stone masons who, rather than using materials cut to ideal measurements, work with found rocks' natural shapes. It combines the rich images and musical language of poetry with prose's capacity to share personal narratives and information from wide-ranging sources.

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Colorfast (Penguin, 2024)

A haunting, intimate, and beautifully-crafted collection of poems rooted in southern Appalachia that reflects on loss and remembrance—and reaches beyond the constraints of time and place.

The book cover titled 'Colorfast' by Rose McLaren features a background of red and black fabric or material on a textured beige surface, with the lower section displaying a red textured pattern. The Penguin Puffs logo and the word 'Penguin' are on the lower left side.
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Forage (Penguin, 2019)

A poet acclaimed for “uncompromising, honest poems that sound like no one else” (The Rumpus) now offers considerations of the natural world and humans’ place within it in ecopoetry of both ambitious reach and elegant refinement.

Arrangement of various flowers and plants, including hydrangeas, ferns, and purple ornamental cabbage, displayed in a white pedestal bowl on a wooden surface with a black background.
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A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia

(UGA Press, 2019)

Stunning images and conversationally written natural history information complement works by contemporary poets, illuminating the wonders of the mountain South.

Book cover titled 'A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia,' edited by Rose McLarney and Laura-Gray Street, featuring a botanical illustration of a plant with green leaves and a flower on a dark textured background.
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Its Day Being Gone (Penguin, 2014)


Rose McLarney’s image-rich poems explore her native southern Appalachia and those who love and live and lose on it. Her second collection broadens these investigations in poems that examine the shape-shifting quality of memory, as seen in folktales that have traveled across oceans and through centuries, and in how we form recollections of our own lives.

A boat floating in water surrounded by numerous discarded computer keyboards with sunlight reflecting on the surface.
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The Always Broken Plates of Mountains (Four Way, 2012)

Rose McLarney's debut collection, The Always Broken Plates of Mountains, gives voice to a chorus of speakers, who are at once plainspoken, reverent, and musical.

Two draft horses pulling a plow in a field.
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