Overview

Finalist for the 2023 Weatherford Award in Poetry Finalist for the 2023 ASLE Book Award in Creative Writing In these haunting, layered poems, Lucien Darjeun Meadows affirms the interconnection of human and environmental identity. ""What can we do but seek nectar where it blooms,"" whispers the porous and questioning speaker ofIn the Hands of the River. With delicate precision, In the Hands of the River subverts traditional poetic forms to show how a childhood for a queer boy of both Cherokee and European heritage happens within and outside dominant narratives of Appalachia.This debut collection weaves ancestral and personal threads of trauma, reclamation, and survival into a multi-generational and multi-species tapestry that reaches from the distant stars visible in an Appalachian holler to the curl of a clover stem and the touch of the beloved, here and now. Moving across time, yet always grounded in place, these poems address the West Virginian landscape, both in exaltation and extraction, balanced with poems about the speaker's own body, and emergent sense of queer identity, as ""a boy made of shards.""

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9781938235993

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Reviews

In his beautiful collection, In the Hands of the River, Lucien Darjeun Meadows examines the wildness and the wilderness of an Appalachian childhood. Here, landscape is ever-present and constantly on the cusp of change-mountains become scars, insect examinations become executions, and homes are one rain away from gone. His loosened sonnets grow in the woods rather than the garden and strain against the tamed version of the from. His stanza stagger away from the edge with a third that brings us and all our songs to the river. -Traci Brimhall, author of Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod In the Hands of the River is a stunning and harrowing debut collection. With exquisite attention, Lucien Darjeun Meadows draws us deeply into an Appalachian landscape where 'mountains rub their shoulders blue / With horizon and a father's scent is an 'open parenthesis of ginseng and smoke.' These poems are so vivid and unflinching, and so richly intertwined with the elements. I felt the title's promise at every turn: held by the river of Meadows' language, carried into music and truth, carving a way toward 'the thrill of light.' -Chloe Honum, author of The Lantern Room

In his beautiful collection, In the Hands of the River, Lucien Darjeun Meadows examines the wildness and the wilderness of an Appalachian childhood. Here, landscape is ever-present and constantly on the cusp of change-mountains become scars, insect examinations become executions, and homes are one rain away from gone. His loosened sonnets grow in the woods rather than the garden and strain against the tamed version of the from. His stanza stagger away from the edge with a third that brings us and all our songs to the river. -Traci Brimhall, author of Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod

Author Information

Lucien Darjeun Meadows is an English, German, and Cherokee writer born and raised in the Appalachian Mountains of what is now sometimes called Virginia and West Virginia. Lucien has received fellowships and awards from the Academy of American Poets, American Alliance of Museums, Bread Loaf Conferences, National Association for Interpretation, and University of Denver. His work has been widely published, including features in Appalachian Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Ecotone, Narrative, New England Review, Pleiades, Poetry Daily, and West Branch. Born and raised in West Virginia, he now lives in Colorado.

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