Pauletta Hansel

Coal Town Photograph Pauletta Hansel

Poetry. I read in a glossary of mining terminology that prize means to lever or loosen with a pry bar or pick. And the term suggests the noun for what is gained: a prize. In COAL TOWN PHOTOGRAPH, Pauletta Hansel prizes memory for the resource that it is. Throughout, this book dives into the challenge of the past as place. Its journey is from underground-darkness to a state of earned brightness. As she tells us in the title poem: 'I am from / a place that could not hold me, / never even tried. Come morning, / mist of evening rain, a ghost above a mirrored sun.' We should prize the work of this traveler forever.--Roy Bentley