Diane Gilliam
Paperback, 88 pages
2004
Perugia Press

Written in the voices of people living and working in the coal camps during the West Virginia coal mine wars of 1920–1921, these vivid poems show how a community responded to a time of danger. Kettle Bottom imagines the stories of miners, their wives, children, sisters, and mothers; of mountaineers, Italian immigrants, and African American families — people who organized for safe working conditions in opposition to the mine company owners and their agents. The poet, Diane Gilliam, whose family was part of the Appalachian outmigration from Mingo County, West Virginia, and Johnson County, Kentucky, has created a book of poems that address a violent time with honesty, levity, and compassion. At its core, Kettle Bottom is about how a community lived in the presence of multiple risks and the choices the residents made.

Awards

• Winner of the 2008 Thomas and Lillie D. Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing

• American Booksellers Association Book Sense Top Ten Poetry Book for 2005

• Winner of the Ohioana Library Association Poetry Book of the Year

• Finalist for the Weatherford Award of the Appalachian Studies Association

• Selected for inclusion in The Pushcart Prize XXX: Best of the Small Presses

• Chosen as the first-year common reading selection at Smith College

Explosion at Winco No. 9

Delsey Salyer knowed Tom Junior by his toes,
which his steel-toed boots had kept the fire off of.
Betty Rose seen a piece of Willy’s ear, the little
notched part where a hound had bit him
when he was a young’un, playing at eating its food.

It is true that it is the men that goes in, but it is us
that carries the mine inside. It is us that listens
to what they are scared of and takes
the weight of it from them, like handing off
a sack of meal. Us that learns by heart
birthmarks, scars, bends of fingers,
how the teeth set crooked or straight.
Us that picks up the pieces.
I didn’t have
nothing to patch with but my old blue dress,
and Ted didn’t want floweredy goods
on his shirt. I told him, It’s just under your arm,
Ted, it ain’t going to show.
They brung out bodies,
you couldn’t tell. I seen a piece of my old blue dress
on one of them bodies, blacked with smoke,
but I could tell it was my patch, up under the arm.
When the man writing in the big black book
come around asking about identifying marks,
I said, blue dress. I told him, Maude Stanley, 23.