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Ironweed by Jackie Ison Kalbli

Original price was: $17.99.Current price is: $15.99.

 

In the 1950s, along with thousands of other Appalachians, Jackie Ison Kalbli’s “Mom and Dad…/ cracked open a fresh can of fate” and traveled north to where jobs were as easy to find as “tomatoes on the vine.” Her collection, Ironweed is a chronicling of one woman’s experience of this migration within our national borders, where a child born “North” is still “marinaded in all that’s Kentucky,” inheriting her parents’ “constant hunger for home.” The book, too, is an elegy for Kalbli’s many ancestors, those who stayed, those who left, and her literary ancestors as well, including her father, an aspiring poet and construction worker who died when Kalbli was a child. “I so enjoy when the dead talk,” writes Kalbli. Readers, too, will enjoy this moving exploration of a migrant daughter’s journey to claim her place.

 —Pauletta Hansel, Author of Heartbreak Tree, Winner of the Poetry Society of Virginia’s 2023 North American Book Award.

 

 

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Ironweed

by Jackie Ison Kalbli

Paper

$15.99 List: $17.99

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This title will be released on February 28, 2025

Ironweed is a glimpse into a family who migrated to Southwest Ohio from Elliott County, Kentucky, in 1950. North across the Ohio, there was economic opportunity. But the journey across by car took them to a place as strange and lonely as their original ancestors experienced coming from the British Isles over 200 years ago. Lack of social connection, language, and cultural differences were significant barriers to the success of this isolated family. The book’s author begins the story at the point when there is a tragic loss in the family, and she begins to search for comfort and purpose through poetry and remembered experiences. The quest is not resolved, and grieving what is lost continues. Ironweed is a wildflower that grows tall in the fields. It is becoming scarce, but when equally challenged against commercial annual blooms, the wildflower persists.

 

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