Lindy Lee: Songs on Mill Hill features over 40 poems based on the history and landscape of Carolina and Georgia textile mill workers from the 1910s to the 1960s. The poems focus on the fictional character of Lindy Lee, her family, and their mill village. Although these poems aspire to portray Southern mill workers as accurately as possible, they constitute a creative work of fiction. Most result from the synthesis of stories gleaned from personal accounts, site visits, newspaper articles, and historical volumes. The poems explore the emotional turmoil, physical hardships, and joys of Southern women and their families in the textile industry.
Pre-sales start May 9th!!
“Kimberly Simms writes with eloquence and empathy about an
important part of Southern history too often neglected.”
--Ron Rash
Author of Serena
A New York Times bestseller and PEN/Faulkner
Award Finalist
“I've been reading the Lindy Lee poems for over a decade
now, and I'm delighted to see them collected in a volume that amplifies their
individual power. In the tradition of Ron Rash, Cathy Smith Bowers, and Linda
Ferguson, Kimberly Simms has chronicled the lives of textile workers in the
Carolinas with historical accuracy, imaginative insight, and lyrical grace.”
-- Dr.
Gilbert Allen
Author of Catma
Robert
Penn Warren Prize Winner
“Innovative and entertaining. Often Simms reminds me of Rita Dove's THOMAS AND BEULAH, the ability to capture a whole human life in only a few carefully-crafted lines. Simms blends the folk-road with the erudite, makes the plain-spoken country-speak stand for the deepest spiritual constructs within our souls. I’ve read this collection several times for the delight and the surprise. I strongly suspect other readers will too. What a new craftsman is here!”
--Paul Allen,
Author of AMERICAN CRAWL and GROUND FORCES
"Focused on a life sewn into mill town culture of the
early twentieth century and on through the sixties, Kimberly Simms’ Lindy Lee: Songs on Mill Hill reignite
an important (but often forgotten) crux of the South's history. These are not
lugubrious, nostalgia-laden poems longing for a South that never was: they are,
in sum, a beautiful lens through which to celebrate and record the joys and
hardships of a charged, mythic, and sweat-soaked place, its kin and kith, and
the microcosmic realities that gather to form a dynamism, a culture still
moving, abiding in memory and the heart."
--William
Wright
Author of Tree Heresies
Georgia
Author of the Year, 2016