?This sequence of 30 fierce, lovely poems is set in the 1940s and '50s at the edge of Greater Appalachia, in west-central Missouri, a world at once exotic and familiar. The poems provide a border state setting for folkways that arrived?two centuries before, in the 1700s?from that much older Border Country, the northern counties of England, the Scottish lowlands, and what would become Northern Ireland.??from the introduction by Philip Garrison