In the Hands of the River
Finalist for the 2023 Weatherford Award in Poetry
Finalist for the 2023 ASLE Book Award in Creative Writing
In these haunting, layered poems, Lucien Darjeun Meadows affirms the interconnection of human and environmental identity.
“What can we do but seek nectar where it blooms,” whispers the porous and questioning speaker of In the Hands of the River. With delicate precision, In the Hands of the River subverts traditional poetic forms to show how a childhood for a queer boy of both Cherokee and European heritage happens within and outside dominant narratives of Appalachia.This debut collection weaves ancestral and personal threads of trauma, reclamation, and survival into a multi-generational and multi-species tapestry that reaches from the distant stars visible in an Appalachian holler to the curl of a clover stem and the touch of the beloved, here and now. Moving across time, yet always grounded in place, these poems address the West Virginian landscape, both in exaltation and extraction, balanced with poems about the speaker's own body, and emergent sense of queer identity, as “a boy made of shards.”
Lucien Darjeun Meadows is an English, German, and Cherokee writer born and raised in the Appalachian Mountains of what is now sometimes called Virginia and West Virginia. Lucien has received fellowships and awards from the Academy of American Poets, American Alliance of Museums, Bread Loaf Conferences, National Association for Interpretation, and University of Denver. His work has been widely published, including features in Appalachian Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Ecotone, Narrative, New England Review, Pleiades, Poetry Daily, and West Branch. Born and raised in West Virginia, he now lives in Colorado.
