The Salvager’s Arts. Number 10 in our Keystone Chapbook Series and selected by Sascha Feinstein as co-winner of the 2011 Keystone Chapbook Prize.

Cover image: Equisetum sylvaticum, by Anna Atkins & Anne Dixon. Cyanotype, 1853. Courtesy of J. Paul Getty Museum.

Release date: September 28, 2013 [150 copies]
28 pages
ISBN: 978-1-949333-01-5
$9.00 > order here

William Kelley Woolfitt teaches creative writing and American literature at Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee. He is the author of two chapbooks: The Salvager’s Arts (poetry), co-winner of the Keystone Prize, and The Boy with Fire in His Mouth (fiction), winner of the Epiphany Editions contest. His poems and stories appear in Shenandoah, Michigan Quarterly Review, Threepenny Review, New Ohio Review, Appalachian Heritage, The Cincinnati Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Ninth Letter, River Styx, Tin House‘s Flash Friday feature, Virginia Quarterly Review’s Instapoetry Series, and elsewhere.  He has hiked a thousand miles of the Appalachian Trail and canoed the Chibougamau lake system in central Quebec; he explores the back roads of West Virginia whenever he can.

Farm Knowledge (ii) 

We are the branches. In the vine we abide.
I think I better understand words like these
when I recall his half-runner and pole beans
that looped and twined around the stakes

he lashed together in teepee frames.
Those scraggly green tendrils
would climb anything,
braid around each other like helix chains,

hog-tie the bean pods so tightly
that when picking beans,
he had to break the vines. Now he is gone,
but his life is in me. 

Rain is in the blossom, sun is in the seed.
The times of together and without
blur at steam-train-speed. The word tree 
fills the cells of the clingstone peaches

we eat, the earth soaks the farmer’s-
market vegetables we stir-fry in sesame oil.
Part of you stays with me sprouts through
the rotten log of good-bye.

• Order Will’s chapbook here.
• Visit Will’s website here.
• Congratulations to Will for winning the 2018 Adrienne Bond Award for Poetry from Mercer University. His new book, Spring Up Everlasting, will be out in 2020.