What Travels With Us: Poems
With a story-teller’s timing and the emotional range of a singer, Darnell Arnoult in her debut collection offers readers a stirring string of poems about the people of Fieldale, Virginia. A planned community founded in the Virginia foothills by Marshall Fields in the early 1900s to support his textile mill, Fieldale was populated by transplanted Appalachian mountain folk. Arnoult herself grew up there, a third-generation resident but among the first generation to leave. She took away with hser the oral history of her home, and in What Travels With Us she captures in poetic form the townspeople’s voices, both remembered and imagined. Personal, poignant, and witty, Arnoult’s poems look back as they move forward, demonstrating how we are always creating ourselves anew from the experiences we carry with us.
Praise for What Travels With US: Poems
“The poems of WHAT TRAVELS WITH US: POEMS are intense, intimate, memorable. Arnoult opens a window on a world and land and lives now mostly gone, and lets the forgotten, the inarticulate, and the dead speak for themselves, which means they also speak for us, as well as to us.”
“Sassy and folksy at times, yet dead-on serious, Arnoult’s work shows the timing of a storyteller and the emotional range of a singer.”
Publishing House: LSU Press
“Plainspoken yet eloquent, Arnoult captures the moments that define whole lives. An entire community comes to life in these extraordinary pages, written with uncommon skill, grace, and understanding—and love.””
“These created worlds—rich in the detail of time and place and rendered in language both lyrical and precise—thrive on small and simple moments that translate the greater meanings and truths.”