Kettle Bottom

Kettle Bottom

Winner of the 2004 Perugia Press Prize, as well as the 2008 Thomas and Lillie D. Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing, <i>Kettle Bottom</i> was named an American Booksellers Association Book Sense Top Ten Poetry Book for 2005. It also was the Ohioana Library Association Poetry Book of the Year, and a finalist for the Weatherford Award of the Appalachian Studies Association. It was selected for inclusion in The Pushcart Prize XXX:Best of the Small Presses. <P>Based on the historical and social events of the West Virginia coal mine wars of 1920-1921, <i>Kettle Bottom</i> imagines the stories of miners, their wives, children, sisters, and mothers; of mountaineers, Italian immigrants, and Black families. These people organized for safe working conditions in opposition to the mine company owners and their agents. Fisher listened closely and the result is a book of vivid, rhythmic, heartfelt poems that address a violent time with honesty, levity, and compassion. <i>Kettle Bottom</i> is about how a community lived in the presence of constant danger and the choices the residents made. These are people to look to today.