A haunting, intimate, and beautifully-crafted collection of poems rooted in southern Appalachia that reflects on loss and remembrance—and reaches beyond the constraints of time and place

Rose McLarney’s fourth collection of poems, Colorfast, reckons with fading and bleeding away, the gray of aging and the gray areas to which truths are relegated. McLarney reconsiders girlhood stories, acknowledges omissions from Southern history, and studies the silences of women’s and other voices left out of accounts of the past. Yet she does not write of only what has been lost, defying elegy with tributes to her mother while she is alive to read them, and finding vibrancy that remains in sources such as weeds, gravel, insect shells, and the flawed human body. Colorfast weaves its threads into poems that, like the women who dwell in them, are subtly strong enough to stand alone, while they also connect into a provocative conversation about heritage and the holds we can keep.

"Rose McLarney's fourth collection of poems, Colorfast, reckons with fading and bleeding away, with the gray of aging and the gray areas to which truths are relegated, with absences and the silence of women's voices left out of accounts of the past. McLarney elegizes stories from her girlhood and memories of her mother, considers omissions from Appalachian cultural history, and offers a series of poems presented as caretaking instructions for a house, for animals, for other humans, for her future self, and for the earth"--