"This sequence of 30 fierce, lovely poems is set in the 1940s and '50s at the edge of Greater Appalachia, in west-central Missouri, a world at once exotic and familiar. The poems provide a border state setting for folkways that arrived--two centuries before, in the 1700s--from that much older Border Country, the northern counties of England, the Scottish lowlands, and what would become Northern Ireland."--from the introduction by Philip Garrison