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by Melissa Toothman (Editor), Melissa Toothman (Illustrator)
So They Can Hear You is the debut anthology from Appalachia Spark. Its pages are a gathering of voices rooted in the hills, hollers, and heartlands of the Appalachian region, and it speaks to the quiet things we rarely say aloud.
This collection moves through grief and humor, tenderness and fury, the aftermath of love and the stubborn persistence of hope. From the careful inventory of a dissolving marriage catalogued in cardboard boxes, to the terror of being known too deeply, to the old ghost lights still flickering in Appalachian memory, these poems don't look away.
What makes So They Can Hear You rare is its range. Serious and strange, intimate and expansive, the collection holds space for every weather of human experience: the knot that holds even as it unravels, the hope that burns as much as it sustains, the landscape that shapes the people who shape the page.
Twelve Appalachian writers contributed their most honest selves to these pages. Together, they offer what the best poetry always has: proof that the things we carry in silence are rarely carried alone.
