"Beauty Strip" considers the landscapes and living things of Appalachia, protests the industrialization that leaves ruin in its wake, and celebrates the human capacity to remake, redeem, and find shelters and homes. Part sketchbook, part dreambook, Beauty Strip maps and ruminates on, haunts and is haunted by, the mountaintop removal sites and mill towns, the salt-works and bloomeries, that have scarred the land from West Virginia to Virginia to Tennessee.
Our Lady of the Mills
The painter dodges the filthy clumps,
despises their chilblained faces,
rabbit-eyes, broken...