Many writers with ambition seek to connect with an audience that’s aware of an America beset with chaos and cruelty, yet with so much possibility. Whether hopes should lie with a future only after some catharsis or in recovering from recent divisions and rediscovering natural and community relationships gone off-track is one of many important matters that can be brought to a fuller contemplation—and perhaps action—with insight from the best of what’s found in libraries and bookstores. Speeches, screeds, and soundbites—even if they pass fact-checks—can’t do it all. Two items worth looking at are the first book-length collection from former Kentucky Poet Laureate (and Renaissance man of letters) Silas House and the latest novel by prize-winning author Jacinda Townsend.
House’s All These Ghosts is a compilation covering many different subjects over years of publishing in a galaxy of outlets. There’s so much to see here that of particular value is an included interview of the poet-author, conducted by fellow Appalachian native Barbara Kingsolver. Their exchange is incisive and direct, as these two esteemed writers consider how House developed and honed observational skills through his experiences in nature and work and as an Appalachian who learned the ways of the heart as a young gay man in a rural community.
House says, “We should seek to not romanticize a place just as much as we seek to not vilify it.” So his choice is complexity, and he shares what all his senses take in while “loving a place that you don’t always feel loves you back as much.” We get warmest remembrances of childhood comforting pleasures in “Timesickness,” but a frightening bashing, in grueling detail, in “Behold This Dreamer.”
Related
Gen-X Author April Raque Celebrates Book Launch—At Mayan Café
The power here is in the witnessing. That encompasses nature as found in anyone’s backyard or across Kentucky, and the region’s people across generations sometimes sharing, occasionally conflicting. A heartbreaking dynamic and memorable piece is dedicated to Breonna Taylor. And there are recollections and eulogies for individuals who have continued the tradition of holding up their revealing light and music: The Everly Brothers and their Muhlenberg roots. John Prine’s ambling perceptiveness. The passion of Schubert and Goethe. And “Those Who Carry Us,” which House presented at the most recent gubernatorial inauguration.
As a poet, as in his other writings, House masterfully limns the bitter sweetness of life. What’s on a given page might be unexpected formality or a conversational exchange that tickles the ear, but the breadth of this collection is shared generously, even if he has his back up or is offering cautious guidance. Noteworthy as always are his specificity and a not-surprising gift for narrative. Yet his way with capturing the universal can be both sly and plainspoken: “I found a family when blood left me in the cold night, but somehow, I kept myself warm.”
Silas House is joined by Kathleen Driskell at Spalding’s Egan Leadership Center (901 S. 4th St.) at 6 p.m. on Thursday, September 11. This is a ticketed event, and the Eventbrite link for tickets can be found on the Events page at www.carmichaelsbookstore.com.
During the course of Trigger Warning, Jacinda Townsend weaves in the everyday, including matters more acutely faced by contemporary Black Americans. Familial fractures, legal and other institutional disadvantages, brutality that can be just around the corner until it is inescapable—in disconcert with modern life that’s confusing enough, as with education and gender, and of course hassles of finance, housing and career.
Related
Hyphen Film Center Creates Third Spaces for Louisville Film Lovers
Unforgettable central character Ruth is introduced at multiple crossroads. Midlife and mid-divorce, with a middle-school child at an all-girl school who’s transitioning to male and a best friend verging on a mental-health crisis. Ruth is watching (and reacting to) the fraying of a self-mythology she nurtured for decades after a series of family tragedies. “She’d not admitted she had a living sister, a dead brother. She’d not admitted to the existence of the city of Rosalind, California, nor to all that had happened there. She’d known, all these years, that remembering would have frozen her along the trench of her father’s killing, run her down its groove over and over again.”
Incidents and revelations increase the pressure Ruth feels about her abandoned past. Any autonomy she tried to maintain is devastated by a housefire gutting the home she’d once shared (in Louisville, practically its own character with careful detail). Her ex-husband feels guilty as parent-on-watch during the blaze, but he’s exerting passive friction from what little he’s learned of the family’s fabrications. Meanwhile, Ruth’s work as a paralegal has gone from continual doldrums to outright outrage, as a family pleads against her powerlessness, seeking release of a young man with video evidence of police abuse.
Soon everything is too much, and Ruth aims her car toward Interstate 64 and her estranged sister—with her child in the backseat protesting this as a kidnapping. For a while the novel shifts gear into a classic odyssey of the American road, which brilliantly opens up perspective.
Some of the themes and motifs of this novel might sit together uncomfortably (police brutality but also astronomy?), but Townsend is accomplishing a balance reflecting real life; it isn’t mere literary juggling. In similar fashion, the ending here is intentionally short so that the opened opportunities and resettling of matters aren’t played for saccharine effect. For the characters, the closest thing to an ultimate understanding might be “your mileage may vary”—but for readers, this novel’s experience delivers considerably on rich and earned intensity.
Jacinda Townsend, along with Wes Blake, is at Carmichael’s Bookstore, 2720 Frankfort Ave., at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, September 23. The Events page at www.carmichaelsbookstore.com has more information.
Related Stories
Gen-X Author April Raque Celebrates Book Launch—At Mayan Café
Hyphen Film Center Creates Third Spaces for Louisville Film Lovers
New Concerts Coming To Kentucky: Talib Kweli, Alexandra Kay, Rome, And More
This article appears in Aug 1-31, 2025.