With an Introduction by Jerry Harp

"Although it’s one of the five largest of Kentucky’s 120 counties, Breckinridge County is one of the state’s poorest. In his long poem “Breckinridge County Suite,” Joe Bolton juxtaposes the potential fecundity of this lush green western Kentucky landscape with the inescapable dead-ending of its poverty—the repetition of living where the living is repetitious. Harsh winters and dying vegetation serve as his metaphors for a kind of despair and loss which the speaker of the poem supposes about the main character, an anonymous, but representative 'young Kentucky woman.' In Bolton’s poem, things happen in the dark, but the dark can be a place for both disappointment and discovery." 

—Rebecca Flannagan

ABOUT JOE BOLTON

Joe Bolton published two collections of poetry in his life, Days of Summer Gone and Breckinridge County Suite. He died in March of 1990. 

ABOUT JERRY HARP

Jerry Harp is a poet, critic, and professor of English at Lewis & Clark College. His books include the poetry collection Creature, and For Us, What Music?, a study of Donald Justice.

40 pages | hand-sewn chapbook | 5.5 x 7.5 in.
ISBN-13: 978-1-935635-52-9