The Tillable Land

By Melva Sue Priddy and Rebecca Gayle Howell

"The Tillable Land is a heart-racing, heart-breaking lyric, a liberating coming of age for our stunted relationship to all that feeds us. I am changed by this book."-Rebecca Gayle Howell, Author of <

• Language: English
• Publisher: Shadelandhouse Modern Press, LLC
• Release date: Apr 19, 2022
• ISBN: 9781945049231

Melva Sue Priddy

MELVA SUE PRIDDY, an American poet, grew up working on her family's dairy and tobacco farm in Hardin County, Kentucky. She received a BA from Berea College, an MEd from the University of Kentucky, and an MFA from Spalding University. Priddy taught English Language Arts and Creative Writing for twenty years. Her poems have been published in Appalachian Review, Lexington Poetry Month, Motes, and Still: The Journal, among other print and online publications. She lives in Winchester, Kentucky, with her husband, and together they own a small farm in White Mills, Kentucky. The Tillable Land is her debut book.

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Contents

Foreword

What Chose To Be Remembered

ONE

Mending Fences and Family Work

God Almighty

What August Work Does to the Body

Before the First Milking

Lord, Bless This Food and the Hands That Prepared It

Among the Things We Counted on Daily: School

Our Sinkhole

Sunday School

When Sleep Refused to Shutter

The 1964 Surgeon General’s Report

But You Snuffed Out Her Girl-Child Self from the Crib

Wavy Glass

Child and Offspring

Ode to the Well House

The Kitchen, Empty

There Is That of God in Me

TWO

Pastoral: Sunup to Sundown, Year ’Round

In the Adjoining Field

Stall

Red Sumac

The Living River Below

Each a New Self Held Up by the Hands of All the Ones Before

Heartwood

The Trouble with Young

Indoor Toilet Built into the Corner of the Kitchen

My Last Spanking

What Little I Knew of God

Was It Possible God Lived in Another Body

What I Couldn’t Give Her

Roof

The Herd Had Deserted Her

Disking Fields, My Mind Runs Free

Box Camera

THREE

Ode to Tobacco Plant Beds

Ode to Cow Manure

Ode to the Dish Sink

Ode to Migrating Birds

Ode to Washing Udders

Ode to Breeding Records

Ode to My Eyes, My Nose, My Fingers

Ode to Amygdala

After Mowing Hay

Side by Side

Ode to My Journals

You Did Not Teach Us Everything We Know

Ode for Nolin River