Ironweed by Jackie Ison Kalbli

I have long-awaited Ironweed, a wander through the backroads with Jackie Ison Kalbli to the Appalachian home in her heart and mind. Hilarious or tragic, ancient or new, celebrated or hidden, it is a beautiful embrace of our shared Kentucky heritage.

–Dale Farmer is a Songwriter, Author, and Filmmaker of The Mountain Minor.

When I need a steady heart to take me on an honest journey through some of the fiercest goodbyes of life, I count on Jackie Ison Kalbli’s poems to flip my head about until even my life has a new hair-do. Ironweed is like being with a friend who drops in with chicken soup and a boom box. It makes me want to howl at the moon even after a lousy day.

–Sherrie Skipper, Poetry appears in Pine Mountain  Sand and Gravel and Common Threads

With unusual vibrancy, Ironweed unfurls fierce narrative poems of family migration, surprising loss, and truths of survival. Kalbli’s South-to-North landscape holds the spirit of steel beams, adaptive mothers “who shoved cabbage down the throat of a Mason jar,” and copperhead stink. Witty cornmeal blessings and weed celebrations entwine with unsettling portraits of gymnasium coffins…razed landscapes…unsettled bones…a stranger’s “greasy wolf teeth.”   This book reveals a “constant hunger for home” with tonal grit and a visual intensity that is sure to haunt.

–Sherry Cook Stanforth, PhD,  Managing Editor, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, Founder/Director, Originary Arts Initiative

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.