Kettle Bottom

Poetry by Diane Gilliam Fisher

Thursday, May 29th at 7:00 pm

Kettle Bottom consists of fifty-one poems divided into three sections, narrated by twenty different speakers. These speakers appear, disappear and reemerge throughout the loosely structured narrative, but their distinctive voices and precisely rendered perspectives are consistent and recognizable; there is no confusion for the reader as to who is the speaker in each poem. Kettle Bottom’s human cast includes the miners and their families; the town’s schoolteacher, whose poems are in the form of journal entries; several black miners who are given the most dangerous jobs in the mine, and their families, who are segregated from the white community; men who are brought in as scabs during a strike; a family of Italian immigrants who have been tricked into working and living in coal country; and even the mine owners. This world is compassionately and believably rendered by Fisher, who does not flinch in the face of its historical and human complexity." - Catherine MacDonald

Diane Gilliam Fisher's family was part of the Appalachian outmigration from Mingo County, West Virginia, and Johnson County, Kentucky. Her first book, One of Everything, was published by Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 2003, and her chapbook,
Recipe for Blackberry Cake, was published in 1999. Fisher lives in Akron, Ohio.