On Phillips Creek

East Tennessee Poet Natalie Kimbell's first chapbook follows the course of her memory from its earliest source to later life. Much of her poetry evokes family connected to the Mullins/ Edwards' homeplace nestled in a holler near Pound Virginia. Kimbell sees herself as the vehicle through which predominately maternal stories, can be told. Using the motif of a river or creek, she lets the idea of water carry readers through the struggle between life and loss; death and acceptance; grief and redemption. Darnell Arnoult, author of Galaxie Wagon and Incantations calls her work an elegiac collection and adds that Natalie Kimbell pays homage to both family and place rooted in the mountains of Virginia--a family and place she once longed to leave and now journeys back to in line and stanza. Poignant and passionate, these poems bring Phillip's Creek to life--the characters and natural landscape of Kimbell's birth and of her spirit. We are made passionate along with her as "mold of earth and time [thread] the air."