Book description
"Our only sin was not having what they thought was enough. And
being forced to take what they called help."
Pain and anger resonate deeply in the voice of New Covenant Bound's
central narrator. Forced from her homeland on the Tennessee River in
the 1930s, she recounts the memory of upheaval and destruction caused
by the Tennessee Valley Authority.
The Western Kentucky area that now boasts beautiful, expansive bodies
of water was once home to some 20,000 people, their houses, farms,
townships and ancestral history. Residents were subjected to three
waves of forced relocation to make way for Kentucky Lake in the 1930s,
Lake Barkley in the 1950s, and Land Between The Lakes National
Recreation Area in the 1960s.
Renowned poet T. Crunk intersperses narrative prose and vivid lyric
verse to explore the devastation one family experienced in this often
overlooked episode in Kentucky history. The voices of a grandmother
and grandson speak to each other over time, evoking the relentless
advance of irrevocable forces that changed the land, forever.
""By juxtaposing the words of grandson and grandmother,
Crunk sets the tragedy in a wider scope, showing how a single
injustice twenty years in the past can still be operative in the lives
of those in the present."--Alabama Writers Forum" --
T. Crunk, winner of the 1994 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize
and writer-in-residence at the Alabama Writers' Forum "Writing
our Stories" project, is the author of Living in the Resurrection
and Parables and Revelations. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama.
