Ron Rash is one of the most distinguished contemporary Appalachian authors. This is the only collection of Ron Rash's poetry that features the best of four of his previous collections along with some new poems. Ron Rash (b. 1953) grew up in Boiling Springs, North Carolina where his parents were professors having worked their way up to that position by moving from the high North Carolina mountains to South Carolina where they worked in textile mills while pursuing their educations. Ron also started out on the lower rungs, teaching at Tri-County Technical College in Clemson, South Carolina, before being named the Parris Distinguished Professor in Appalachian Cultural Studies at Western Carolina University. He started out writing poetry and then began publishing short story collections, including Burning Bright, which won the FRank O'Connor Award in 2010 as the most outstanding story collection written that year in the English language. Working up to publishing novels, his Serena was made into a Hollywood movie and was a 2009 finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Of this poetry collection, The New York Times Book Review wrote, “Rash illuminates his dark material with humor and tenderness...The elegies for a landscape and its inhabitants in Poems: New and Selected leave us with a renewed sense of how ‘too much too soon disappears.’”
New York: Ecco, 2016. 171 pages. Hardback in dust jacket.