Biography

Carolyn Hembree’s poetry collection, Skinny, came out from Kore Press in 2012. In 2016, Trio House Books published her second collection, Rigging a Chevy into a Time Machine and Other Ways to Escape a Plague, winner of the 2015 Trio Award and the 2015 Rochelle Ratner Memorial Award. Her work has appeared in Colorado Review, Drunken Boat, The Journal, Poetry Daily, and other publications. She comes from Tennessee and now lives in New Orleans.

Schedule

2:45 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.
State Library of Louisiana, Capitol View Room
Reading
Louisiana Poets, Part II

3:45 p.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Barnes & Noble Bookselling Tent
Book Signing

Rigging a Chevy into a Time Machine and Other Ways to Escape a Plague

Carolyn Hembree's Rigging a Chevy into a Time Machine and Other Ways to Escape a Plague, selected by Neil Shepard for the 2015 Trio Award and by Stephanie Strickland for the 2015 Marsh Hawk Press Rochelle Ratner Memorial Award, was published by Trio House Press in 2016. The collection is a sequence of poems arranged like a truck owner’s manual. Set in rural Appalachia, “a truck up on concrete blocks” functions as time machine for V. Cleb, an accursed wanderer trapped and liberated by the limits of his world. When spiritual and material realms commingle, visions of cosmic significance are revealed. Biblical cadences, elliptical phrasing, and a deep-rooted vernacular distinguish the voice of these poems. “Through wormhole after wormhole,” the book inscribes a landscape visceral, haunted, afflicted, afflicting.