Forage

by Rose McLarney

Published 3 September 2019
Winner of Weatherford Award for Best Poetry Book about Appalachia

A poet acclaimed for "uncompromising, honest poems that sound like no one else" (The Rumpus) now offers considerations of the natural world and humans' place within it in ecopoetry of both ambitious reach and elegant refinement


Rose McLarney has won attention as a poet of impressive insight, craft, and a "constantly questioning and enlarging vision" (Andrew Hudgins). In her third collection, Forage, she continues to weave together themes she loves: home, heritage, the South, animals, water, the environment. These intricately sequenced poems take up everything from animals' symbolic roles in art and as indicators of ecological change to how water can represent a large, troubled system or the exceptions of smaller, purer tributaries. At the confluence of these poems is a social commentary that goes beyond lamenting environmental degradation and disaster to record--and augment--the beauty of the world in which we live.

Its Day Being Gone

by Rose McLarney

Published 27 May 2014
Selected as a winner of the National Poetry Series by Robert Wrigley

Rose McLarney has won acclaim for image-rich poems that explore her native southern Appalachia and those who love and live and lose on it. Her second collection broadens these investigations in poems that examine the shape-shifting quality of memory, as seen in folktales that have traveled across oceans and through centuries, and in how we form recollections of our own lives. An opening sequence presents contemporary ghost stories: men who gather at dawn in the gas station parking lots of small towns; the mountain lion that paces the edge of a receding tree line. A middle section draws connections between Appalachia and Latin America, places that share qualities of biological and cultural richness—places that are threatened by modernization. A final sequence retells the stories of earlier poems, posing questions about how we construct our landscapes and frame our views.

Colorfast

by Rose McLarney

Published 5 March 2024
A haunting, intimate, and beautifully-crafted collection of poems rooted in southern Appalachia that reflects on loss and remembrance—and reaches beyond the constraints of time and place

Rose McLarney’s fourth collection of poems, Colorfast, reckons with fading and bleeding away, the gray of aging and the gray areas to which truths are relegated. McLarney reconsiders girlhood stories, acknowledges omissions from Southern history, and studies the silences of women’s and other voices left out of accounts of the past. Yet she does not write of only what has been lost, defying elegy with tributes to her mother while she is alive to read them, and finding vibrancy that remains in sources such as weeds, gravel, insect shells, and the flawed human body. Colorfast weaves its threads into poems that, like the women who dwell in them, are subtly strong enough to stand alone, while they also connect into a provocative conversation about heritage and the holds we can keep.