Bill King

Bill King's book of poetry  The Letting Go explores the deep connection between place and the individual.  The poems are thematically arranged into four sections and move from issues of youth and parenthood, to chronic illness, to Appalachia and the scourge of mountaintop removal. Despite the threats of cancer and big coal that give the book an elegiac tone, ultimately, these poems invite readers to celebrate family, the natural world, and Appalachia.   

King emphasizes that the work is not a memoir, although it is based on personal experiences. “The personal challenges that I have touched on in the book are the ones that make me love my family and the world more,” King said. He dedicated the book to his wife, Beth, and their two children, Elizabeth and Walter. 

Reviews

Marc Harshman, West Virginia Poet Laureate and the 2016 Weatherford Award Winner for Poetry for his book Believe What You Can. 

“In this book I am continually struck by King’s remarkable attention to detail: ‘the barbed wire / that stitched the hem / of old man Warner’s field…” or a robin that “runs upright like a butler, / then bends, as if bowing…’ Such wonderful imagery is harnessed not only to reveal the natural world, however, but the ins and outs of raising children, the challenges of illness, and what it means to bear witness to tragedy.  There are, for instance, powerful poems here describing the horrific devastation wrought by mountain-top removal mining, poems whose testimony is deeply moving.  These marvelous poems charged with closely-observed imagery and fueled by such a care-filled spirit should gain for Bill King’s poetry a deservingly wide and lasting readership.’  

Maggie Anderson, author of five books of poetry, including Dear All (2017), The Great Horned Owl (winner of the Best Small Press Books of 1979), and the founding editor of the Wick Poetry First Book Series. 

Bill King’s poems are so precisely enacted that to read them is to feel our thighs pumping bike petals, to surge with the jonquils breaking spring soil. He writes with the deep intelligence that knits the natural world to metaphor and gives us a usable model for how to love this mortal place even as we know we are leaving it.  I admire these poems very much.  They are healing; they ‘carry the wounded skyward.’”