Flatback Sally Country bookcover

Flatback Sally Country

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Description

Rachel Custer's Flatback Sally Country is hard-hitting and harrowing and almost hypnotically beautiful in its deft singing of the stories of America's vast middle, of the flyover land pinned beneath the derision of coastal elites. Personas like Tommy Two Fingers, Old Maid, and Flatback Sally herself tell us of lives "lived alone behind / the turned back of the world," nursing "the desperate shame // of broken teeth, of ugliness / that can't afford disguise." Think holler; think burnt-out, spit-out coal town; think meth; think whole communities sunk into the grave-deep rut of poverty. Violence is done in this book, to factory workers' bodies "feeding [them]selves in pieces to machines" to keep America's shelves stocked, and to women, especially those kinds of women, like Sally, so often hooked and gutted by men's wants and needs. Flatback Sally Country is a timely, vitally important book by one of the most gifted young poets writing today.

-Francesca Bell, What Small Sound

Product Details

PublisherTerrapin Books
Publish DateMarch 20, 2023
Pages96
LanguageEnglish
TypeBook iconPaperback / softback
EAN/UPC9781947896628
Dimensions9.0 X 6.0 X 0.2 inches | 0.3 pounds

About the Author

Rachel Custer is the author of The Temple She Became (Five Oaks Press, 2017). She is the recipient of a 2019 fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts and a 2015 mentorship from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including Rattle, OSU: The Journal, B O D Y, The American Journal of Poetry, The Antigonish Review, and Open: Journal of Arts & Letters. She attended the University of Indiana and the University of Chicago. She lives in Indiana.

Reviews

Flatback Sally Country is a fraught lament to a broken place-poor, small, ignored-a source of shame even for those who call it home. As Custer writes, "The history of a place like this is the history / of those who leave it." Yet this poet doesn't leave it; rather, she zooms in toward the darkest, coldest corners of this community, painting rich and haunting portraits. Flatback Sally Country is a book that grieves, but it also praises the lost, the overlooked, the yet to be salvaged.

-Anders Carlson-Wee, Disease of Kings


"He who made you bitter made you wise," wrote Yeats. In this, the much-anticipated second collection by NEA award winner Rachel Custer, we meet Flatback Sally, small-town gal with a bad reputation, whose considerable wounds have made her wise, made her determined to rise like song, made of her "a fire waiting to happen." And what if a man in her memory or in her room lit a match and left her to burn? There's an angel with her in the flames, an angel called Poetry who will keep her alive, as alive as these poems.

-Tom C. Hunley, What Feels Like Love: New and Selected Poems

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