Pauletta Hansel grew up in Jackson, Kentucky, in the Eastern Kentucky coalfields. Although she has lived most of her adult life in the Cincinnati area, she has maintained her ties to Appalachia through the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative, Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, and other regional literary enterprises. This is her seventh poetry collection. “Pauletta Hansel prizes memory for the resource that it is. Throughout, this book dives into the challenge of the past as place. Its journey is from underground-darkness to a state of earned brightness.” – Roy Bentley. “There is a constancy of underlying comfort in these unvarnished poems even when they address difficult matters including broken-heartedness. It would not be surprising if you found, as I did, meaningful echoes of your own life, your own people, in the tender narratives of Pauletta’s latest book.” - Susan F. Glassmeyer. “When I read poetry, I love the fresh responses and insights to life’s episodes, images that hold the chin of my attention in their light hands, nostalgia for the past, understanding of what it is to be here on this planet and in this world with the changing landscapes of body. I have found all of these needs met in Pauletta Hansel’s work, and especially in her new Coal Town Photograph collection” - Ron Houchin.
Loveland, Ohio: Dos Madres Press, 2019. 60 pages. Trade paperback.