Author Event: Ian Hall - Creekwater Mansions (Poems)

Creekwater Mansions documents the intimacy of duress. A son puffs cigarette smoke down his grandad’s throat because the old man is too feeble to draw breath; retired draft horses learn to dance; the land manager’s hired muscle flaunts an axe-handle; a grieving family uses a coffin as a card table; schoolboys siphon gin out of shag carpet just to catch a high. These are love poems—unsparing and spun of daily life in Eastern Kentucky. Author Ian Hall writes, “Those are my people. I want nothing more than to esteem them, and to show outsiders that even gruesomely human moments stripped of any decoration still have the heft and horsepower to be transcendent.”