By Bonnie Proudfoot

From the first line of the first poem of Kari Gunter-Seymour’s new poetry collection, Dirt Songs (Eastover Press 2024), we are presented with a poetic voice that sings with authority, perspective, and experience, also one that is grounded in place. “Where I’m from, girls learn / to conjure young . . .”  and with that, readers are enticed to discover more about both the poet and the place she came of age in. In Dirt Songs, dedicated to “All the invisible girls,” Gunter-Seymour writes against invisibility, conjuring identity through personal history, story, naming, heightened use of detail, and through humor, grief, and pride. “Our grandmother. . . wielded a scythe and hoe / good as any man. . .  drew us maps, where we came from.” These songs call attention to phrasing and language, to the rhythms of speech of Appalachian Southeastern Ohio, rich with imagery and music, a place where, “. . . [windshield] wipers slip-slap the beat / like two metal spoons against the thigh.” Speech patterns overflow into the making of poems. “I was a new mother,” Gunter-Seymour writes, “alone more than was fit.”  

Along with a vivid and compelling voice, Dirt Songs offers a sense of history / herstory as it is lived through generations. “I taught myself who I was / by sounding out my name. . . I was the silk gown my mother/ would never own, the black dust / of coal-fraught mountains. . . my restless breaths shouldered / their way, history’s finger to its lips. . . I quarried roots, digging in, like my great-grandfather’s oxen / dragging a crusty plow.”  Gunter-Seymour does not take for granted the appropriation that underlies land ownership across this country. In “Land Lessons,” she writes, “She lived here all her life/ a gift to know this land, its seasons / tastes, smells, mindful of its wants — even knowing every acre was once taken / by violence. We all have mortifications, / history’s footprints threaded among the trees.”

Here, the poetry moves in scope from the inexperience and exuberance of girlhood to the realities of single-motherhood, then forward in time to grand-motherhood, from the poet’s joys, lessons, and losses. Poet Kathy Fagan writes, “I admire the swagger and wisdom of this voice and the raw tenderness with which the poet greets her subjects. . . .”  The insights are savvy and revelatory, a vital antidote to stereotypes or empty platitudes that the Appalachian region has been subjected to and silenced by, historically as well as in the contemporary political climate. “Too much / prattle, unweighted,” Gunter-Seymour declares, “could damn well loose a demon.” 

As current Ohio Poet Laureate and as editor of the nine volume Women Speak anthologies/ reading series, the award-winning I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing: Ohio’s Appalachian Voices (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions), and the founder of the Spoken and Heard visiting author series, Gunter-Seymour’s mission has been to raise awareness about the richness and diversity of the Appalachian region through poetry, fiction, memoir and song. In Dirt Songs, as in Gunter-Seymour’s three previous collections: the award winning Alone in the House of My Heart, (Swallow Press 2022); A Place So Deep Inside America it Can’t Be Seen (Sheila Na Gig Editions 2020); and Serving (Crisis Chronicles Press 2016), the poetry moves from personal history to into American history, from landscape to heartache. Gunter-Seymour writes, “When we write our truths, we create a force of light and understanding, a place where we can draw strength and find solace.” 

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Bonnie Proudfoot’s fiction, poetry, reviews, and essays have appeared in journals and anthologies. Her novel, Goshen Road, received the 2022 WCONA Book of the Year and was long-listed for the 2021 PEN/ Hemingway Award. Her poetry chapbook, Household Gods, was published in 2022 by Sheila-Na-Gig. She lives in Athens, Ohio.