Native Fruit

STEPHANIE KENDRICK is the author of Places We Feel Warm (Main Street Rag Publishing, 2021), editor of "Periodical Poetry." With a Masters of Social Sciences from Ohio University, she is the Major Unusual Incident Compliance Coordinator at the Athens County Board of Developmental Disabilities. She serves as a Village Councilwoman in Albany, Ohio, where she lives with her phenomenal husband and their talented son. On any given day, you might find her binging on trash TV, hiking through the hills of Athens, or training jiu-jitsu. Her poems have appeared in Sheila-Na-Gig online, Gyroscope Review, Northern Appalachia Review, Poets Reading the News, Still: The Journal, and elsewhere. Visit her website to check out more of her work, and upcoming events at stephthepoet.org.

ABOUT THE BOOK: In Any of These Towns explores the quirky underbelly of small-town America. The poems in this collection navigate the hardships that many river, coal and factory towns face as industry has packed up and moved on. Characters based on real people appear throughout to inject color and humanity into the darkness that inevitably seeps into the poems. Children pop in and out to remind us of their usefulness; and personal accounts of lived experiences offer a balance to the surreal atmosphere present throughout. The neglect and destruction that the places and people of this book have survived provide fertile ground for the kind of hope and resilience that's lurking within each page.