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Belle Point Press

PRE-ORDER: Water. Witness. Word.

PRE-ORDER: Water. Witness. Word.

$16.95 USD
$16.95 USD
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Water. Witness. Word., by Marianne Worthington

**This is currently a PRE-ORDER title. Forthcoming Publication Date: June 23, 2026**

Water. Witness. Word. is a meditation on loves and griefs of many shapes: place, family, and shared visions of a world fading away. The speakers in this stunning, formally diverse collection consider the relationships between humans and the natural world, between injustice, identity, and power. Marianne Worthington’s unique voice powerfully expresses a love of place that isn’t always lovable, the challenges of chronic illness, and the beauty of the natural world even when exploited and in peril.

 

Marianne Worthington is author of The Girl Singer (University Press of Kentucky, 2021), winner of the Weatherford Award for Poetry. Her work has appeared in Oxford American, CALYX, Swing, Southern Humanities Review, and Zone 3, among other places. She cofounded and co-edited Still: The Journal, an online literary magazine publishing writers, artists, and musicians with ties to Appalachia (2009-2024). Her work has been supported by Kentucky Arts Council, Kentucky Foundation for Women, and Appalachian Sound Archives Fellowship. She has co-edited two anthologies for the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop at Hindman Settlement School. A retired college professor, she grew up in East Tennessee, and lives, writes, and teaches in Southeastern Kentucky.

 

Praise for Water. Witness. Word.

"Water. Witness. Word. is astounding for its range of poetic forms and its deep dive into place as both location and inheritance. Set against the rivers, lakes and ridgelines of Kentucky and Tennessee, the poems in this stunning collection are unflinching in their interrogation of environmental ruin while simultaneously holding space for moments of beauty observed from a kitchen window. With clarity and grace, this collection is both a reckoning and a hymn, a testament to what survives and what is lost when a place and its people are remade."

—Sarah Freligh, author of Sad Math

"Marianne Worthington's poems help me know that I didn't imagine those rhythms of speech, that atmosphere of melancholy and soulful witness, foibles and sharp wit that many of us swam in growing up in the twentieth-century South. Worthington is among our best Southern writers. There's something of James Agee and C.D. Wright to her poems with their fine, pointed voice, but her music is unmistakably her own. In Water. Witness. Word., the poet takes us along before the election to 'think about how we are so much worse than wild / animals, our moneyed egos thrust / into each other's chests.' But she also helps us understand the sacredness of deer in the yard, '[h]ow the fleeting sight of them helps plug the holes our mothers / left behind when they died.' We finish this book having thought through our humanness in all its love and fearsome loss. I cherish these poems and what they help me see."

—Joanna Penn Cooper, author of The Itinerant Girl's Guide to Self-Hypnosis


Details:

    • Publication date: June 23, 2026
    • Trim size: 6 x 9 in

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