Search results for ""Michael Henson" "Maggie Boylan""

Book SynopsisSet in rural America amid an epidemic of opiate abuse, this collection of stories tells of a woman’s search for her own peculiar kind of redemption. Addict, thief, and liar, Maggie Boylan is queen of profanity, a hungry trickster. But she is also a woman of deep compassion and strength. Her journey is by turns frightening, funny, and deeply moving.Trade Review“Trouble—much of it self-inflicted—follows Maggie Boylan, the unconventional hero of this powerful novel from Henson (Ransack). Maggie is ‘straight as a bullet, foul-mouthed, skinny, death-head-looking, Oxy-addled, thieving’—a folk hero for the fentanyl-ravaged heartland.…Despite its short length, Henson’s novel packs a punch: it’s harrowing, haunted, and often beautiful.” * Publishers Weekly *“Henson’s stories are focused, relentless, and beautifully written.… I read every word of this book, and read it slowly. [Maggie is] a failure at almost everything—yet Henson allows her the subtlest of redemptions.…What a balancing act these stories are. It’s the best book I’ve read all year.”“Michael Henson is one of the finest authors of literary fiction writing today. His Maggie Boylan stories give voice to those among us who are seldom heard. Maggie Boylan is an important work of art, beautifully rendered.”“Henson gets to the heart of working class and underclass people in ways that break your heart and then put it together again through the power of his art.”“A devastating short fiction collection about the incestuous relationship between local law enforcement and drug dealers as well as the clients they both share—hapless and resourceful addicts, of which Maggie is queen. Henson’s collection is easily the best fictional account of the widespread meth and Oxy wreckage in Appalachia since Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone.”Praise for Michael Henson’s A Small Room with Trouble on My Mind: “Michael Henson is the Philip Levine of the urban Appalachian working class. His writing is so immediate that you feel the vibrations of guitar strings and sirens, smell beer and sweat, and hear broken glass crunch under your feet. Nothing is pretty in this world, but much is beautiful, seen through Henson’s compassion for his characters and his clarity about generations wrecked by capitalism without conscience.”“Every now and again I happen upon a writer who slays me. A writer whose stories resonate with truths so raw, they leave me aching for the characters and the community they inhabit. Michael Henson’s Maggie Boylan is such a book. Henson is a master along the lines of William Gay. Maggie will haunt you.”

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Book SynopsisSet in rural America amid an epidemic of opiate abuse, this collection of stories tells of a woman’s search for her own peculiar kind of redemption. Addict, thief, and liar, Maggie Boylan is queen of profanity, a hungry trickster. But she is also a woman of deep compassion and strength. Her journey is by turns frightening, funny, and deeply moving.Trade Review“Trouble—much of it self-inflicted—follows Maggie Boylan, the unconventional hero of this powerful novel from Henson (Ransack). Maggie is ‘straight as a bullet, foul-mouthed, skinny, death-head-looking, Oxy-addled, thieving’—a folk hero for the fentanyl-ravaged heartland.…Despite its short length, Henson’s novel packs a punch: it’s harrowing, haunted, and often beautiful.” * Publishers Weekly *“Henson’s stories are focused, relentless, and beautifully written.… I read every word of this book, and read it slowly. [Maggie is] a failure at almost everything—yet Henson allows her the subtlest of redemptions.…What a balancing act these stories are. It’s the best book I’ve read all year.”“Michael Henson is one of the finest authors of literary fiction writing today. His Maggie Boylan stories give voice to those among us who are seldom heard. Maggie Boylan is an important work of art, beautifully rendered.”“Henson gets to the heart of working class and underclass people in ways that break your heart and then put it together again through the power of his art.”“A devastating short fiction collection about the incestuous relationship between local law enforcement and drug dealers as well as the clients they both share—hapless and resourceful addicts, of which Maggie is queen. Henson’s collection is easily the best fictional account of the widespread meth and Oxy wreckage in Appalachia since Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone.”Praise for Michael Henson’s A Small Room with Trouble on My Mind: “Michael Henson is the Philip Levine of the urban Appalachian working class. His writing is so immediate that you feel the vibrations of guitar strings and sirens, smell beer and sweat, and hear broken glass crunch under your feet. Nothing is pretty in this world, but much is beautiful, seen through Henson’s compassion for his characters and his clarity about generations wrecked by capitalism without conscience.”“Every now and again I happen upon a writer who slays me. A writer whose stories resonate with truths so raw, they leave me aching for the characters and the community they inhabit. Michael Henson’s Maggie Boylan is such a book. Henson is a master along the lines of William Gay. Maggie will haunt you.”

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Book SynopsisThe Opioid Epidemic and US Culture brings a new set of perspectives to one of the most pressing contemporary topics in Appalachia and the nation as a whole. A project aimed both at challenging dehumanizing attitudes toward those caught in the opioid epidemic and at protesting the structural forces that have enabled it, this edited volume assembles a multidisciplinary community of scholars and practitioners to consider the ways that people have mobilized their creativity in response to the crisis. From the documentary The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia to the role of cough syrup in mumble rap, and from a queer Appalachian zine to protests against the Sackler family's art-world philanthropy, the essays here explore the intersections of expressive culture, addiction, and recovery.Written for an audience of people working on the front lines of the opioid crisis, the book is essential reading for social workers, addiction counselors, halfway house managers, and people with opioid use disorder. It will also appeal to the community of scholars interested in understanding how aesthetics shape our engagement with critical social issues, particularly in the fields of literary and film criticism, museum studies, and ethnomusicology.Table of Contents Introduction: The Opioid Crisis and Expressive Culture Travis D. Stimeling Part I. On the Outside Looking In: The Opioid Crisis from Without 1. ""Something Too Pure / Is Killing Us"": Opioid-Addiction Porn, Endurance, and the Neoliberal Appropriation of Resilience Jordan Lovejoy 2. ""Snort Pills on My Head"": The Visual Rhetoric of Addiction, Abjection, and White Trash in The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia Christopher Garland 3. The Pill: Aesthetics, Addiction, and Gender in Jennifer Weiner's All Fall Down Ashleigh Hardin 4. Prince, Tom Petty, and Pain: Projections of Authenticity in Popular Music Leigh H. Edwards 5. ""Maybe If I'd Stayed"": Appalachian Outmigration and Narratives of Loss in Nate May's Dust in the Bottomland Travis D. Stimeling Part II. If You Lived Here: Representing the Opioid Epidemic from Within 6. Pretty Lil Azzie Crystal Good 7. The Way the World Is: From Maggie Boylan Michael Henson 8. Finding Maggie Boylan Michael Henson 9. You Talkin' about Me? Turning the Blood of Appalachia's Opioid Epidemic into Ink Jacqueline Yahn 10. Remediating the Opioid Crisis in Museums Ethan Sharp 11. A Hole Is Not a Void: Extraction, Addiction, and Aesthetics Jonas N. T. Becker 12. Narrative Engagement with the Opioid Epidemic: From Personal Story to Personal Reflection Amanda M. Caleb and Susan McDonald 13. Recovering from Addiction in Sobriety: Narrating Disability/Mental Illness through the Medium of Comic Art Tatiana Prorokova-Konrad 14. ""Hey, Let's Have a Very Good Time"": The Opioid Aesthetics of Post-Verbal Rap Austin T. Richey Part III. New Day Dawning: Recovery, Sobriety, and Post-Opioid Futures 15. Queer Addiction and Queer Harm Reduction in Appalachia Gina Mamone 16. Healing Open Wounds Chelsea Jack 17. Pain Is One Dance Partner: Move with It Anne Lloyd Willett 18. Images of Opioid Addiction, Recovery, and Privilege in Mainstream Hip Hop Paige Zalman 19. The Voices of Hope A Recovery Community Choir: Redefining Self, Community, and Success Natalie Shaffer Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisWith poems that are as complicated, breathtaking, and ravaged as Ohio’s southeastern foothills, state poet laureate Kari Gunter-Seymour shares an insider’s appreciation for Appalachia’s hard-worked land and hardworking people, who persevere with honor, humility, and courage through multigenerational struggles.Trade Review“A breathtaking, artful set of poems on loss, family, place, and memory.” * Kirkus (Starred review) *“We reckon that nine generations in Appalachia is long enough for a place to get in the bones of a family, and that kinheritance has marked Kari Gunter-Seymour with an intuitive feel for one of America’s most isolated and peculiar regions.” -- Matt Sutherland * Foreword Reviews *“Kari Gunter-Seymour’s talent shines like a diamond in this collection: solid, clear, sparkling.” -- Donna Meredith * Southern Literary Review *“These poems are delicately nuanced and so hard-edged, so unique, they can make you catch your breath.” -- Hephzibah Roskelly * World Literature Today *“The poems of Kari Gunter-Seymour’s Alone in the House of My Heart are ragged with loss, yet sustained by all they take in through the senses, from Mother’s ‘cat-eye glasses, Pentecostal bun,’ whispering ‘loud enough / for the soprano section to hear,’ to ‘collards and heirloom tomatoes / strapped to stakes like sinners / begging the lash.’ As the details accrue, they generate a place conjured by memory, the Appalachia of the speaker’s upbringing, where she nested in the loft of the barn in the hay, ‘spicy sweet,’ and where canned fruit cocktail is the ultimate delicacy. Still, it is a place sowed with the seeds of its own undoing—fracking, coal dust, addiction. Language itself is somehow larger even than the consciousness that creates it, more expansive than right and wrong, and ‘free of the splintery / cold of our foolish selves,’ poetry, which here is synonymous with hard-won love.” -- Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets, winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry“Kari Gunter-Seymour’s poems are full of passion: passion for people, passion for place, passion for imagination. Her images are ‘pinpricks grey and blue’ that inhabit us as readers, feed us strength, and give us history—the good, the bad, and the triumphant. In poem after poem, [she] gives us a map to the unsayable and the courage to say it. She knows the pleasures of daily living, the dignity of grieving, and the terror of loss. She knows that when ‘the alcohol has stopped working,’ all we have are words to get us by, get us through, and get us over.” -- Allison Joseph, author of Confessions of a Barefaced Woman“Kari Gunter-Seymour weaves memory, place, love, and pain into a vibrant, complex tapestry of her native southeastern Ohio Appalachia. ‘So much here depends upon / a green corn stalk, a patched barn roof, / weather, the Lord, community,’ she writes. The images in these poems are striking, the language fresh. We smell ‘the tang of weeping cherry,’ see up close the devastation of ‘fracking waste, red clay dust, the bitter soot / of coal’s see ya later sucka!’ Her people are flesh and blood: a great-grandfather ‘at seventy, / firm of belly, back plumb as a disc blade,’ her mother ‘bronzed and shapely’ in a field of daffodils. Alone in the House of My Heart is a deeply moving portrayal of family and home, inheritance and loss, written by a poet whose gift is to insist ‘ordinary things be somehow more.’” -- Ellen Bass, author of Indigo“‘Everything has a dream of itself,’ writes Kari Gunter-Seymour in this splendid new collection. These poems sing of apples and alcoholism, families that pass along wounding and wonder and hard-earned laughter. ‘Promise the garden will thrive, / the thirsty Ohio will hold its drink and the Zoloft / prescribed by the clinic will banish the spirits,’ ends another poem, and it is just this combination of hard truth and humor, love, and the ache of loss right below it that draws me in. These poems stubbornly celebrate the people and landscape of Appalachia; they are American, melancholy, life loving. I wish I could quote every word of ‘An Appalachian Woman’s Guide to Beer Drinking’ here, but you’ll just have to read it for yourself.” -- Alison Luterman, author of In the Time of Great Fires“A strong collection, evocative of James Wright in its images of land and pathos and Gerard Manley Hopkins in its music and the power of its language.” -- Michael Henson, author of Maggie Boylan and Secure the Shadow: A Novel

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