Like the Mountains of China

These poems connect people living in disparate times and places. Drawing on her life in Appalachia and a brief visit to China in the mid-1990s, the author analyzes the ordinary and the exotic, evoking in one poem the stoicism of prisoners' families on visiting day at an Ohio prison and in another the sensuality of the imperial court strolling through the summer palace near Beijing. Popular figures, such as Mohammed Ali, are depicted as sharing the same heroism as teenage soldiers on China's revolutionary long march. Jenny Wiley escapes from her Shawnee captors. A skinny young entrepreneur dies trapped in a Kentucky cave he hoped to open to tourists. Daniel Boone, Amelia Earhart, Li Po, Einstein's brain, and Osceola's head all figure in this poetic melee.