NCWN

Sandy Ridge: Portrait of a Depression Family
By Kermit Turner
Publisher: Finishing Line Press
Price: $12 plus $1 shipping
Publication Date: October 22
Prepublication orders are being taken at this web site: www.finishinglinepress


 Sandy Ridge: Portrait of a Depression Family presents the struggles of a troubled rural family in the N.C. piedmont during The Great Depression and following years.
     
Kermit Turner's Sandy Ridge: Portrait of a Depression Family presents in formal verse a riveting reality of hurt and hope.  What Beauty shines in these imperfect people through their turmoil to survive."  -- Shelby Stephenson
 
     ". . . Direct and wholly without pretension, the language and manner of Sandy Ridge  exactly match its subject matter. Kermit Turner does not flinch from rendering a hard  scrabble world in which only courage and endurance make survival possible.  Here is  an unforgettable portrait . . . ."       -- Fred Chappell
 
     "Turner sculpts his narrative poem series out of the hard stone of experience.  His unobtrusive formal verse with its seemingly invisible rhymes imbues his characters wit fierce dignity.  Turner takes the raw material of hardship and through rigorous but tender craft gifts the reader with music and light."   -- Tom Hawkins
 
"The poems in Kermit Turner's wonderful chapbook Sandy Ridge remind me of Walker Evans' photographs in James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Men..... stark, gritty, wholly memorable."    -- Joseph Bathanti