Promotional Information

Planted by the Signs brings us the contemporary Appalachian poetry of Misty Skaggs. With a knack for pointed personal and social observation, 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: women who know how to plant by the signs.

About the Author

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.

Reviews

“Last night I was reading these poems, sitting in a chair in my city living room. As I did, clover sprouted, enfolding my toes, rug turned meadow. Gooseberries draped my shoulders. Thorns pricked my neck. The heat pump blew honeysuckle and tobacco, lilac and pine. A super moon, a woman’s face, broke through the window, bidding me to do right. It was weird. I recommend it.”

“(Skaggs) has a fine ear for rural storytelling tradition, and her language, tales, and recollections thrum with authenticity….Wherever Misty Skaggs’s poetry takes her, I want to be there to read it.”
*The Rumpus*

“If the reader can embrace even just one-fourth of the gratefulness that this speaker has for the basic pleasures in life, then she will come away from this collection with a deeper sense of contentment and reverence.”
*Journal of Appalachian Studies*

“These are the poems we need—their surprise, their shine, their fearlessness, their joy, their brazen and unrepetant love of women the world has tried (and failed) to render invisible. If ever there was an example of the political and the personal merging with pure fearlessness and urgency, it’s happening in this book by Misty Skaggs. Give yourself over to them. You'll be grateful you did.”

“These poems are 100 percent hillbilly and smart and beautiful. Skaggs writes contemporary Appalachia with the power and grace of a young woman who knows it in her heart and her bones.”

“I love (Skaggs’s) reverence for life and the irreverence for the status quo. These are strong poems from a woman who knows what it means to truly bloom where she is planted…. (An) extraordinary collection.”
*WVXU, Cincinnati NPR*

“The land of the southern Appalachians presents a forbiddingly stony countenance, but for those unafraid to turn over the rocks, to work the dark earth underneath, to follow the signs of the sky, the creatures of the earth, and the whisperings of the heart as they plant their seeds, the results are not only nourishing but filled with powerful beauty. Misty Skaggs is one such poet, and here she shares her bounty.”

“Misty Skaggs is more than an artist. She is a writer, a gardener, a caregiver, a photographer, and an all-around lover of the Eastern Kentucky mountains where she was born, raised, and lives. This book is the closest thing to a ‘zine’ that I’ve seen a university press publish.”
*Appalachian Mountain Books*

“Skaggs vividly portrays life in the Highland South, impressively moving from the poignant to the wildly amusing and back again. Like an Appalachian Anne Sexton, she bluntly and ironically examines female experience. There’s a down-to-earth edginess to many of the poems in this collection that I have rarely seen before in Appalachian poetry.”

“She loves what the rest of us would do away with: weeds, peach trees without harvest, lard, the back road, our grandmothers. In Biscuits and Blisters we have the first work of what will surely turn out to be a lifetime of beloved and wrought poetry from Skaggs.”