Lung Deep Country

From the husk-haunted American Southern Plains to a 'sunshine-lonely' metro entrance in Turkey, Lung Deep Country sings a poetry of landscape and longing. The poet meditates on family and loss, the heaving of one's spirit, the 'great secret our grandmother taught us.' With perfectly observed detail-'the rust-red watering edge' of Oklahoma's Canadian River, 'the elbows of men fighting for space in the crowded ferries' of Istanbul-Lydia Renfro evokes the wrenching power of lovers lost, childhood vanished, heritage claimed and held closely. 'It is a family poem,' she writes, 'an earth poem...it bristles my heart and sings the wounds there.' Lung Deep Country is a tour de force. These poems of yearning and place catch the heart, choke the throat; they call us to our own memories, entice us to 'pick up the conversation we've left off,' as the poet says, '-the one started as children in the deep night.' -Rilla Askew, author of Most American: Notes from a Wounded Place