Copperhead

These sinewy, sensuous poems lead down dusty Louisiana backroads, where anything might be lurking: family secrets, rusted relics, a viper. In Copperhead, her debut collection, Rachel Richardson pays homage to the folklore and myth of an Old South that is rapidly disappearing. Riffing from Leadbelly to road signs to the Lucky Lady Lounge, from Britney Spears to broken levees to the first white woman executed in the state, Richardson weaves a rich and conflicted portrait of a place continually haunted by its past. These are poems-as-documentary, an accounting of a region's history and future--politically charged, environmentally reverent, and always shot through with song.

Author: Rachel Richardson
Publisher: Carnegie-Mellon University Press
Published: 02/17/2011
Pages: 88
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.30lbs
Size: 8.30h x 5.40w x 0.30d
ISBN13: 9780887485367
ISBN10: 0887485367
BISAC Categories:
- Poetry | American | General

About the Author
RACHEL RICHARDSON has published poems in the New England Review, Slate, Southern Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Michigan and an MA in Folklore from the University of North Carolina. Her awards include a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a Hopwood Award, and scholarships to the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers' Conferences. She has taught in several prisons, public schools, and universities, and lives in Greensboro, North Carolina.