The Mountains Are My Bones: Poems and Stories from Appalachia

What does it mean to belong to a place that has never quite let you go?The Mountains Are My Bones is a literary collection of poems and short stories rooted in Appalachia and the people, places, memories, and stories that shape a life there.Moving between poetry and prose, these pieces explore Appalachian speech and identity, family traditions, church culture, ordinary beauty, grief, coal and labor, abandoned places, cemeteries, folklore, haunting, survival, and hope. Some are drawn from lived experience; others are fictional, folkloric, or imagined. The collection deliberately allows those boundaries to blur, reflecting an Appalachian tradition in which a story can be remembered, embellished, inherited, and still somehow remain true.Appalachia emerges here not as a picturesque backdrop or a collection of stereotypes, but as a living place: complicated, humorous, beautiful, wounded, stubborn, changing, and deeply rooted. The mountains hold family histories. Front porches become places where hard truths are finally spoken. Old roads carry the memory of people who left. The dead remain present in names, stories, graves, and the habits of those who survived them.At its heart, The Mountains Are My Bones is about inheritance-not only what we receive from the people and places that raised us, but what we decide to carry forward.This collection will appeal to readers of Appalachian literature, contemporary American poetry, regional writing, literary short fiction, folklore, family history, and reflective writing about home, memory, grief, identity, and belonging.