Who You Grow Into by Amy Le Ann Richardson

“Who You Grow Into is a celebration of cultivation, in all possible nuances. Richardson’s poems lead us to gather acorns, hoe the garden, can venison, and browse seed catalogs. And threading throughout these moments, they’re cultivating connections between human and nature, ancestors and descendants, past and future, death and life. The poems start with simple lines like “We’re building an off-grid cabin” and “I cleaned the kitchen today” and then take us out to the border between the wilds of human experience and its tended garden, where we can remember what was, care for what is now, and dream of what will be.”

—Melissa Helton, author of Inertia: A Study and Hewn and Literary Arts Director at Hindman Settlement School

“Amy Richardson and her husband Channing live on 230 acres in Olive Hill, Kentucky, where they caretake an orchard and propagate walnuts, heirloom apples, and pawpaws, where they tap maple syrup for market, where they grow and forage the food they eat. It is a place they inherited from Channing’s grandparents, a place tended and learned from in lineage, across decades, time in time, hand in hand. Such a place holds stories in its very soil—children raised, dogs romped and lost, love and rainstorms stomped through: the matters of lives well lived. But who stops long enough to hear these stories, to notice and name them? Who stops?—to say that this life, this day, this one is the one, the only prize. Amy Richardson does. Each of these elegant poems rings out into the air with the kind of art that marks the greatest of our poets: attention. Who You Grow Into reminds me how to be alive.”

—Rebecca Gayle Howell, poetry editor of The Oxford American, Assistant Professor of Poetry and Translation for the University of Arkansas MFA Program, and author of Render/An Apocalypse, American Purgatory, and A Winter Breviary.