Praise for Colorfast:
“To the ever-widening world of Appalachian literature, Colorfast offers a new, fresh voice with necessary perspectives as it reconsiders family stories, historical omissions and generational female burdens and elegies. Colorfast is necessary and provocative, inclusive and exploratory.” —Southern Review of Books
“Rose McLarney’s writing is vibrant and magical as she considers the terrain of her Appalachian upbringing. McLarney interrogates the omission of women’s voices from history, the natural environment of the South, and the stories of her girlhood. Her diction is precise and patient as she applies a unique vision to the often-overlooked parts of the world.” —Electric Literature
“McLarney (Forage) so smoothly blends the everyday with historical resonance, the natural world with the human, her Appalachian upbringing with the wider world, and philosophical reflection with blackberries and near-transparent mica . . . At once down-to-earth and sensuous.” —Library Journal
“McLarney collapses time, crafting something simultaneously region-specific and universal.” —Shelf Awareness
“The book is a marvel—McLarney’s best, I think, and one of the finest, most mature, carefully constructed, and thoughtful collections I have encountered in some time.” —Preposition Magazine
“Rose McLarney writes in the lineage of Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Charles Wright, bell hooks, James Agee—Appalachian poets of precise vision, unafraid to live according to the land’s own slow and knowing time. In this new book McLarney takes us further, sustaining a vibrant intimacy with what our country dangerously dismisses as the past: the capacity to love and be loved by our specific, broken places and the ancestors that break our ground. Colorfast is magnificent. This is a book for anyone who has ever longed for a home, even when it hurts. In other words, this book is for us all.” —Rebecca Gayle Howell, author of American Purgatory
“Colorfast is an exquisite book. Rose McLarney looks into the hard surfaces of southern Appalachia with a scrutiny at once ferocious and patient. She lingers in a woman’s world of textiles and dyes, minerals and canning jars, and lets us feel their stubborn glinting persistence against what is worn away, what wears us away: the passage of time, the suffering we inflict on each other and ourselves, the absences we create by not seeing each other clearly. In almost every poem there’s a prayer to see—to glimpse the real value of gems and girls, slow craftwork, grief itself. Rose McLarney is rare, her vision rare, her voice holding fast to candor and wisdom, ‘finding color in the hearts of rocks.’” —Joanna Klink, author of The Nightfields
“Colorfast is a remarkable waltz . . . cool dips, wide swings, splashing colors alongside crawdads big as lobsters, near mountain curves unfolding . . . An immersive life in verse. Splendid.” —Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, author of Look at This Blue
