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The subjects of poetry are the same: love and loss, sex and death and grief, family in all its permutations and complications. The differences are in the telling, and Kory Wells is a powerful teller. Her poems are as layered and dense as her grandmother's Red Velvet cake. What is it, she asks, that makes us want to swallow // a story whole? To think // only one version can be true? With a clear eye, she confronts the paradoxes that gender, race, and heritage present. She writes from a rootedness in her homeland that reaches down generations. She writes as a citizen of this troubled world: I'm unlearning the urge for a sugar fix like I'm unlearning // my threshold for what is acceptable, terrible, commonplace. // Tell me I don't have to unlearn hope. She does what we ask of the poet. All that we ask. -Marie Harris, former New Hampshire Poet Laureate
About the author
Kory Wells is the author of "Heaven Was the Moon," a poetry chapbook from March Street Press (2009). Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including the James Dickey Review, Ruminate, Stirring, and The Southern Poetry Anthology. She also performs her poetry on the album Decent Pan of Cornbread, a collaboration with her daughter, folk musician Kelsey Wells.
A seventh generation Tennessean, Kory worked in software development before leaving that career to focus on her creative life. In 2017 she was selected as the inaugural Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee. She is founder and manager of Poetry in the Boro, a reading and open mic series, and is active as an arts advocate, teaching artist, and storyteller. She is also a mentor with the low-residency program MTSU Write and a board member of the Rockvale Writers' Colony.
SUGAR FIX is her first full-length collection.
