Rachel Rinehart

Rachel Rinehart grew up in Chuckery, Ohio, and teaches at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia. Her poems have appeared in journals including Prairie Schooner, Mid-American Review, Beloit Poetry Journal and Colorado Review. This is her first poetry collection.

THE CHURCH IN THE PLAINS BY RACHEL RINEHART

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"'The Church in the Plains' is anchored in stories of New World immigrants (here, German Lutherans) from the 1800s to the present, but to read Rachel Rinehart's collection as a historical chronicle would be like reading the voyage of Odysseus as a guide to Ithaca. Her poems, often voiced by women from the perspective of birthing and 'this tearing of curtained flesh,' remind us that the great power of poetry, in the words of a truly gifted storyteller, can transmute events and lives into the wondrous and terrifying: a harrowing marriage to Siamese twins; a baker of funeral pies, each appropriate to the deceased; a man who dreams his wife is a buzzard; a vixen prowling the night woods merges with the Latin name of a constellation overhead.

As the book evolves, the ancestral language and character of the church give way to newer generations, but Rinehart's vision is one of both loss and renewal. In an early poem a child is buried at sea; in the last, a child is the sole survivor of a car wreck. Even then, the undercurrent of darkness and sorrow is present: 'Like Christ, we, too, crawl into an ever-weltering world,' while a wind from the plains rises to a Kyrie -- Lord have mercy unto us -- as prayer and benediction. Rachel Rinehart has given us a truly beautiful, earthy and fabulous book." --Peter Everwine, Author of "Listening Long and Late," contest judge "From timber to beam, Rachel Rhinehart's 'The Church in the Plains' is built of beautifully hewn poems. A congregation of rural, midwestern voices inhabits these pages and offers testimony of the sublime-spirited and broken-bodied. Rinehart's poetry reminds us that 'for every dog dead on the road,/another limps home, and the cock escapes/ the fox's jaws to crow a third time.'. This is a soul-searing and brilliant debut collection." --Amy Fleury, author of "Sympathetic Magic"