The flight that Frank X Walker refers to here is the flight from rough reality that comes from using dope. This is something that Walker has experienced up close and personal with multiple extended family members and acquaintances. This little book with a limited print run is a true collector's item. Frank X Walker is one of the most charismatic of Appalachian authors. He is the leader of a small group of people-of-color around the University of Kentucky who began to refer to themselves using a term Walker coined - Affrilachians. And his charisma shows in each of his many presentations all over the country. The strength of his poetry has been recognized in many ways including his becoming Kentucky's only African-American Poet Laureate. "Up until this point in American history, no poet has written an honest and believable lament about the crippling effects from the tornado swirl of a crack pipe, how a little rock being melted between thin mesh screen creates pallid smoke: a monster, a slave to the white lady that is cocaine. In About Flight, Frank X Walker gives us the beautiful ugly narrative of a brother who is wrestling with chemical dependency, and losing. The high, in all of its beautiful contradictions takes on the metaphor of flight, and so we soar through the terrible highs and lows of a protagonist who carries his family with him into the den of iniquity." —Randall Horton
Lexington: Accents, 2015. Trade paperback.