More Advance Praise
“Rose McLarney writes in the lineage of Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Charles Wright, bell hooks, James Agee—Appalachian poets of precise vision, unafraid to live according to the land’s own slow and knowing time. In this new book McLarney takes us further, sustaining a vibrant intimacy with what our country dangerously dismisses as the past: the capacity to love and be loved by our specific, broken places and the ancestors that break our ground.
Colorfast is magnificent.
This is a book for anyone who has ever longed for a home, even when it hurts. In other words, this book is for us all.”
—Rebecca Gayle Howell, author of American Purgatory
“Colorfast is an exquisite book. Rose McLarney looks into the hard surfaces of southern Appalachia with a scrutiny at once ferocious and patient. She lingers in a woman’s world of textiles and dyes, minerals and canning jars, and lets us feel their stubborn glinting persistence against what is worn away, what wears us away: the passage of time, the suffering we inflict on each other and ourselves, the absences we create by not seeing each other clearly. In almost every poem there’s a prayer to see—to glimpse the real value of gems and girls, slow craftwork, grief itself.
Rose McLarney is rare, her vision rare, her voice holding fast to candor and wisdom, ‘finding color in the hearts of rocks.’”
— Joanna Klink, author of The Nightfields
Colorfast is a remarkable waltz step Appalachia, girlhood grown, resilient, reasoned, sway backed cats and war cake, courtesies considered, cool dips, wide swings, splashing colors alongside crawdads big as lobsters, near mountain curves unfolding, it tests topography, tailoring, fit, and fastens person homegrown.
An immersive life in verse, this book is fixed to pleasure. Splendid.
—Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, author of Look at All This Blue