Kettle Bottom

by Diane Gilliam Fisher

“Students immediately engaged with the poems; faculty found the poems a productive way of exploring issues of class, of race, of history and who gets to tell it, of suffering, of moral choice, and of resilience.”

—Carol Christ, President of Smith College

“In Kettle Bottom, Diane Gilliam Fisher probes the emotional truth of coal camp history, and then extracts it — holds its darkness in the light of her brilliant lines.”

—Joyce Dyer

“Kettle Bottom is a one-woman rescue operation accomplished in words that say plainly, as the miners might have, yet eloquently, as only a gifted poet can, that these men and women and children were once here in the same world as ours, that they gave up the breath in their lungs and even their very daylight to fuel this world, and that their hopes for their lives and the terrors they endured, who they loved and so often lost too soon — that all of it mattered. As it matters that after so many years someone finally heard their faint tapping and, with the urgency of love, went tunneling toward them.”

—NewPages.com

“Kettle Bottom serves as a reminder that everything in life can be the stuff of poetry, that every life is extraordinary in some way and has something to teach us.”

—Appalachian Heritage

“The poems in Kettle Bottom deliver, with the simplicity of homespun, details about coalfield faith, childhood, family, workplace danger, bias, marriage and — again and again — economic injustice. Fisher’s collection is a profoundly human portrait that rings out beyond the folds of a lost Appalachian story. [It is] an inquiry into coal that returned with diamonds.”

—Daily Hampshire Gazette

“Fisher’s little book held me like a vise, touched me like a prayer. It made me feel like I had lived and walked with the people in its pages.”

—The Transylvania Times