Sarah Pross was born and raised south of Knoxville, Tennessee in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. She shares a home with her rescue pup Charley (who is the real alpha). Sarah has been published in Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, Watershed Review, Kakalak, and Cathexis Northwest. She is the author of Grounding (Main Street Rag, 2021). Instagram: @sarahp0529
PRAISE:
“[S]he fought / endless black dirt in floorboards / and under fingernails” (“Obsession”) is one of the many hard truths in Coal People. Who are the people we come from? What landscapes do our souls inhabit? Poet Sarah Pross balances observation and exploration as she traverses her family history through this collection. The reader delights in Pross’s language even as she engages with the difficult stuff of the real through poems like “Frog Level” where a family “[m]akes a life out of nothing in a company shack” and constantly worries about the “rumble of collapse and the siren” (“Slate Falls”). Though tough times are evident throughout these poems, there are also moments of gladness when Pross realizes that “[t]his is where / my memories are made” (“Farm Summer”). A great read for lovers of both history and poetry; one readers will continue to think about even after closing the back cover.
–KB Ballentine, author of All the Way Through and Spirit of Wild
The images that occupy the pages of Sarah Pross’s most recent book of poems are straight from the mountains of Appalachia, and straight from Pross’s heart. Honeysuckle, azaleas, rhododendron thickets, butterweed, and ironweed spice the mountain air before bowing to “fall leaves stand[ing] vibrant maroon and gold” and to the sure coming of frost and snow, memories of summer’s watermelon on an “old silver cake pan / . . . fork in one hand / salt shaker in the other” gone now, replaced by evenings wrapped in a quilt, book in hand, dogs nearby, houses lighting up one by one, places where families want to be, the only sound that of “snow falling / on snow.” Pross’s mountains are a fine place to be, and her poems take us there gently with all the love mountain people have for the place where they live.
–Connie Jordan Green, Author of Nameless as the Minnows and other titles.
Poet Sarah Pross pays homage to her kin in this, her second chapbook, Coal People. In these poems, Pross embraces her ancestors, those whose “heart cells” are “coated in black dust/and serpentine.” The reader can feel hardship in these camps, especially the women who daily listen for “the widow whistle” and wonder if her family will be the next one destroyed by this lifestyle. In these rich lines of poetry, Pross describes “air as thick as butter” where her people “fought endless black dirt.” In this season of her own life, Pross knows “the rootedness that keeps” her at home where she longs to learn and love and remember “knee to knee.” At her adopted home in the holler of endless mountains, Sarah Pross weaves her story poems at a “kitchen table – where the world begins and ends.” To read and savor Coal People is to revel in self and kin, where the poet celebrates that she is “small/made of stardust” in her Appalachian home.
–Sue Weaver Dunlap, author of: Thursday’s Child, A Walk to the Spring House, Knead, and The Story Tender
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