Basin Ghosts

Basin Ghosts is a chapbook of original poems by Jesse Graves, author of Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine. Many poems in Basin Ghosts address places and themes that resonated in Graves’s first collection, which won both the Weatherford Award and the Appalachian Writers’ Association Book of the Year Award in Poetry. The poems in Basin Ghosts examine life in the rural South, changes that have occurred over generations in communities there, and the ways in which the past lives on through memory and attachment to the land. Grace Notes Leora never walked the quarter-mile of red dust to her bench at Big Sinks schoolhouse without carrying the hand-sewn satchel she used for an accordion case. The notes came to her out of some darkness, a cavity just inside her ear where the curve of a sound pushed through her fingers and into the buttons of that strange machine. Where did the accordion come from? The imprint read Vienna Austria 1904 and how it arrived to her in Capps Creek, Tennessee, the middle of the middle of nowhere will pass like the mystery of cloudburst, some graceful symmetry beyond this world and beyond the next.