Culture
Kari Gunter-Seymour’s ‘A Place So Deep Inside America It Can’t Be Seen’
By: Emily Votaw
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In late April Kari Gunter-Seymour’s A Place So Deep Inside America It Can’t Be Seen was published by Sheila-Na-Gig.
Gunter-Seymour is a recently retired instructor for Ohio University’s E.W. Scripps School of Journalism, the Immediate Past Poet Laureate of Athens, OH, the executive director of the Women of Appalachia Project, and a poet whose work has appeared in publications such as Rattle, Still, CALYX, Main Street Rag, The American Journal of Poetry and The LA Times.
“As writers, we are challenged to write what we know, and what I know is what it is like to be an Appalachian woman in southeast Ohio, Appalachia,” said Gunter-Seymour. “Some of my people through the generations have come from the Carolinas and Tennessee and West Virginia and Kentucky so these stories, other people’s stories, have been handed down to me, but they are women’s stories.”
A Place So Deep Inside America It Can’t Be Seen is a book of poetry about a kaleidoscopic array of topics, all united by Gunter-Seymour’s exposure to them or personal experience of them. From the pack horse librarians who brought literacy to the hollers of Appalachia during the Great Depression to the way in which wise women of Appalachia plant their herbs and vegetables and fruits by paying attention to the astrological signs playing out in the heavens, Gunter-Seymour’s latest published work dives deep into the collective feminine psyche of Appalachia and returns with beautifully spun words and images both sorrowful and joyful.
Gunter-Seymour spoke to WOUB Culture about the book in the feature embedded above. You can purchase the volume at this link.
