Forage by Rose McLarney

Rose McLarney is clearly the fastest rising young poet from Appalachia today.  The Fellowship of Southern Writers gave her their New Writing Award for Poetry, and she has been awarded fellowships to the MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf and the Sewanee Writer’s Conference and has served at Poet in Residence at Dartmouth.  In an interview published in the New England Review she describes Forage in this way: “I’ve been describing Forage as comprised of intricately sequenced poems on themes including animals’ symbolic roles in art and as indicators of ecological change and 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. Forage, like my previous work, does deal with history, place, and the environment. But it’s less about the particular home environment in which