Eureka Mill

The Asheville Citizen-Times writes: "Every now and then a book comes along that transports us so thoroughly to another time and another way of life that, when we finally put it down, our own lives don't quite look the same. It is even more remarkable if the book is set where we live, a place we thought we'd been." These poems make up a dramatic and lyrical portrait of the migration of poor Buncombe County farmers to a mill village outside Chester, S.C. However, the book is much more than documentary. Rash, whose grandparents and parents worked in the Eureka Mill interweaves his family's personal history with the broader texture of mill life, giving us at once intimacy and perspective, heart and understanding.

Ron Rash is a 1994 winner of the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry.