In "Wildflower Flower,""whose title derives from a traditional country song, Byer speaks through the fictional voice of a mountain woman named Alma, who lived in the Blue Ridge wilderness around the turn of the century. In narrative and lyric, Byer's poems sing a journey through solitude, capturing the spirit and the sound of mountain ballads and of the women who sang them, stitching bits and pieces of their hardscrabble lives into lasting patterns. The landscape Byer depicts is haunted by disappointed love and physical hardship, but it is blessed with dogwood and trillium, columbine and...

Byer opens her book with a ten-poem sequence, In the Photograph Gallery. "'Who is she?' / a child hanging on to her mother's skirt / asks, as if she...

Navigating the dangerous currents of family and race, Kathryn Stripling Byer's sixth poetry collection confronts the legacy of southern memory, where too often "it's safer to stay blind."

Beginning with "Morning Train," a response to Georgia blues musician Precious Bryant, Byer sings her way through a search for identity, recalling the hardscrabble lives of her family in the sequence "Drought Days," and facing her inheritance as a white southern woman growing up amid racial division and violence. The poet encounters her own naive complicity in southern racism and challenges the narrative...