by Stephanie Kendrick (Author), Hayley Mitchell Haugen (Editor)

In Any of These Towns explores the quirky underbelly of small-town America. The poems in this collection navigate the hardships that many river, coal and factory towns face as industry has packed up and moved on. Characters based on real people appear throughout to inject color and humanity into the darkness that inevitably seeps into the poems. Children pop in and out to remind us of their usefulness; and personal accounts of lived experiences offer a balance to the surreal atmosphere present throughout. The neglect and destruction that the places and people of this book have survived provide fertile ground for the kind of hope and resilience that's lurking within each page.