“In Forage, Rose McLarney speaks to the interiority that hums inside us as we engage the natural world, which ‘speaks of us,’ as we ‘praise parks, what’s left of wilderness, and the literature of the diaspora.’ It’s all here, and it’s all alive with every line -- these poems stun me with their keen eye and their honest telling of what they view. It’s refreshing to find this much courage on the page, at a time when we need it the most.”
-Van Jordan

“McLarney’s book is a call to prayer -- or to arms -- making itself a guardian of the diminishing natural world, in poems of fierce, edgy charm, of despair and forgetting. Beauty, that lives here too."
-Marianne Boruch

These poems in their gorgeous imagistic clarity deepen the story of life and ask of us, as the poet asks of herself, “to whom/ have I made reverence truly known?” And what does the poet revere? The word, the wounded land, the wile of the wild, the shade of trees. An earthly constellation.”
- Alison Hawthorne Deming


A reader's companion to Forage is available here.

A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia--a combined literary and natural history anthology—is a guide to getting know 60 outstanding species from Southern Appalachia, one of the most biodiverse areas on earth, and to knowing the place in broader, poetic senses as well. This anthology collects poems for each species, many commissioned especially for the project from the writers who make up another great Southern Appalachian wealth—its rich literary community—illustrations by regional artists, and conversationally written natural histories.

A selection of 11 poems, natural histories, and pieces of artwork are featured here in Southern Humanities Review, as well as teaching tips and writing prompts to use with the book.

National Poetry Series Winner

“A beautiful book, and a haunting one too. McLarney makes things matter. Her poems make you feel very deeply connected – under the skin, in the bone – and therefore more acutely alive.”
-Robert Wrigley

“It’s easy to say that McLarney loves the land and the people who live close to it, and though that’s true, her intelligence and feelings are also always subject to reappraisal in the light of her own constantly questioning and enlarging vision. Her important poems sing not just with the “the somber percussion/of feed in buckets,” but also with the lyric wisdom of the best poetry.”
-Andrew Hudgins

“In poems that are often both celebration and lament, McLarney speaks with an elemental alertness, with sharp-edged perception of the contemporary as well as the folkloric.”
-Robert Morgan

Rose McLarney’s poems are work of the first order. Unsentimental, empathic, informed by her unerring eye and ear, they are rooted in a specific quarter of the earth and speak to the complexities of fidelity, devotion, desire, and the force of time. But most impressive is the way McLarney unfailingly unearths the embedded metaphor and imaginative life of the quotidian. Blood and feathers exceed the actual seamlessly, giving her poems both lift and weight. The Always Broken Plates of Mountains stands as beautiful testimony to the power of time and place and language.

-Jane Brox

The Always Broken Plates of Mountains is not a book about a way of life; it’s a book about life beyond a single lifetime, the whole, continuous life of one place and the generations of human fidelity to it. Pinched with grief, then soothed with beauty, Rose McLarney’s poems sway back and forth like a treetop in the breeze. Above all, McLarney observes a world charged with the magic of slowness, a phrase that pulses with the truth. This is a moving and carefully wrought book.
- Maurice Manning