“Colorfast is magnificent…this book is for us all.”

-Rebecca Gayle Howell

“Exquisite . . . McLarney is rare, her vision rare…”

-Joanna Klink

“It’s refreshing to find this much courage on the page, at a time when we need it the most.”
 -Van Jordan

“…poems of fierce, edgy charm, of despair and forgetting. Beauty, that lives here too." 
 -Marianne Boruch

“Her important poems sing not just with the ‘the somber percussion / of feed in buckets,’ but also with the lyric wisdom of the best poetry.” 

- Andrew Hudgins

This combined literary and natural history anthology is a guide to identifying 60 selected species of Southern Appalachia, one of the most biodiverse areas on earth, and to knowing the place in broader, poetic senses.

“Rose McLarney’s poems are work of the first order. Unsentimental, empathic, informed by her unerring eye and ear, they… speak to the complexities of fidelity, devotion, desire, and the force of time.”

- Jane Brox

ANNOUNCING

A NEW BOOK OF LYRIC ESSAYS

forthcoming from LSU Press,

March 2026