Planted by the Signs: Poems

By Misty Skaggs

Planted by the Signs brings us the contemporary Appalachian poetry—cultivated in the dirt of Elliott County, Kentucky—of Misty Skaggs. With an eye for details that exquisitely balance personal and social observation to communicate volumes, she tells the stories of generations of women who have learned to navigate a harsh world with a little help from the Farmers’ Almanac and the stars. The collection is separated into three sections that reference the best times to grow and harvest. Knowing and following these guidelines—planting by the signs—could mean the difference between prosperity and tragedy in the lives of Appalachian families.

Personal, political, and passionate, Planted by the Signs also explores what it means for Skaggs to care for her great-grandmother at the end of her life. Color photos by the poet further showcase her sidelong and fierce outlook. The images and poems together deliver an intimate look into the day-to-day reality of a backwoods woman embracing barefooted radicalism in the only place she could call home.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Release date: Sep 24, 2019
• ISBN: 9780821446805

Misty Skaggs

Misty Skaggs was born and raised in the backwoods of Eastern Kentucky. She still lives in and works from a holler in Elliott County, where she tends to her poetry, her Mamaw, and her garden. Skaggs is an artist and activist as well as an author and editor, and her Appalachian roots are tightly entangled with all of her work.

Book preview

Wet Dew

My place is five fifteen

in the morning

in a plastic lawn chair.

The kind you buy

four for twenty

at the Dollar General.

Flecks of red spray paint

cling to my skin.

The tortoiseshell cat is satisfied

to sleep in the cradle of my legs,

crossed ankle to knee

like a man.

She’s making biscuits.

Needlepoint pricks

of practiced country cat claws

kneading my pale, doughy flesh.

The stray shepherd,

one eye sky blue and

the other mud brown,

is never satisfied.

But he missed me

when I ventured off the Ridge

and into town.

So he sits

as patient as he can manage

and I scratch his muzzle

and listen to the knock

of his tail on loose, front-porch

floorboards.

We sit in silence.

Except for the thump and the purr.

Except for the cardinal

screaming

Wet dew! Wet dew!

one last time

before the light breaks

the whole holler.

The Home Cemetery

We keep our dead

at the dead end

of a rutted gravel road.

Generations filed away

forever

in staggered rows.

They belong to me.

A birthright of last breath

And rotting body,

buried safely beneath

six feet of soil.

The dark soil

I came from.

Full grown and dirt poor.

This is my acreage.

Rich bottomland fertilized

by bone.

The cemetery floats,

a rounded island tethered

to the