Gold Hill Family Audio by Corrie Lynn White

Description

“Corrie Lynn White’s debut collection stays faithful to the idea that holiness can be found in any earthly place. While lazing in bed or weeding the garden. While hunting for panty hose at the Rite Aid or walking beneath the neon glow of the neighborhood BP. I love this book for reminding me that, whether we notice or not, the world invites our wildness, fatigue, heartbreak, and desire. Gold Hill Family Audio is as local and universal as a book of poems can be.” —David Roderick, author of The Americans

“Turn the dial in the other direction. Tune to the station where you hear silence, or is it a song?—vibrating into that air which rises between the past and the present, between regret and bold strength, that uncomfortable air where truth resides. The song is sung by a woman, of course. A woman who is learning she cannot find her value in nostalgia, no matter how much she loves her people and their place. In Gold Hill Family Audio, Corrie Lynn White gives us the FM on her inheritance out of Gold Hill, North Carolina—the grandmothers and hogs and the China Wok, the State Fair, the closed shops, the dried creek—and with it all, the answer to Muriel Rukeyser’s famous question: ‘What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?’ Rukeyser says the world would split open. White says, sure, but the woman? Let’s find out.” —Rebecca Gayle Howell, author of American Purgatory

“The poems in Corrie Lynn White’s Gold Hill Family Audio have all the intimacy and urgency of prayers – prayers for a deeper connection to place, to family, to our very selves. They celebrate and they mourn, oftentimes in the very same line. This is a poet who understands that what we love can be both blessing and burden. This is a book that asks ‘everyone’s tired question: how to live the bonkers / life we’re given and how the hell to love,’ then answers that question again and again by singing ‘the broken chords of stumbling on.’ These are the kinds of poems that reach into your life and change you.” —Austin Smith, author of Flyover Country

“It is hard not to fall in love with the sensual, contemplative, sharp-eyed and often playful voice of Corrie Lynn White in her gutsy debut as she traverses the landscape of her personal history—its ‘uneven ground’ and its badass set of matriarchs—looking to chart her own ‘narrow road’ toward a complete and fulfilling life. Sometimes that means, ‘delet[ing] Tinder,’ and going it alone. Sometimes that means embracing romance and its raw pleasure: ‘I sleep next to him/like a hog/ when it finds/ cold mud.’ Where must we go? And, who with? It is the anxieties of this poet’s very human search that ring most true. And, as a woman, I have rarely felt so seen by a book.” —Lauren Goodwin Slaughter, author of Spectacle

Corrie Lynn White’s poetry has appeared in Oxford American, New Ohio Review, Best New Poets, Mid American Review, and Mississippi Review, among other places. Originally from Gold Hill, North Carolina, she holds a BA from UNC Chapel Hill and an MFA from UNC Greensboro. She currently lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where she works as a journalist and was named the 2021 Tennessee Arts Commission Fellow in Poetry.