All the Lands We Inherit

These intimate, vulnerable prose poems provide a unique perspective into the complex story of a daughter and her relationship with her ailing mother. Price has undeniable skill for relaying the white working class experience with accuracy, accountability and grace. Price is a masterful storyteller, writer and artist: this book is compelling and the story lingers with you. You’re going to get immediately pulled into this captivating, urgent narrative.

–Jose Hernandez Diaz, author of Bad Mexican, Bad American

In All the Lands We Inherit, Darby Price’s contemporary recasting of the biblical book, Lamentations, the author offers us a book of hybridity, uneasy with the confines and conventions of a single genre. She weaves lyric to narrative, affliction and misery to compassion and filial love.

One might read this book as a sequence of prose poems—compact, bristling with image and insight—or perhaps as a book of prose, novel-like in its complexities, memoir-like as it seeks to unknot the entanglement of memory, while avoiding the easy conclusions of a memorial.

At the center of Price’s meditation is the figure of the mother, her mother—a lively, complicated, righteous, and stubborn person—for whom the book is a pre-elegy, a lament that is at times harrowing and at time humorous, a portrait that is at times tender with, at times confounded with, its subject. Across the book’s sixty-six lyric vignettes, Price confronts the burden and blessing that is
her mother, a body on its journey from the womb to the grave, a presence that foretells an absence, a severance that calls for lamentation.

–Eric Pankey, author of The History of the Siege

Sharp, tender, insightful, and also very funny, Darby Price’s All the Lands We Inherit draws from loss and mourning the bounty of life. I couldn’t stop reading. Each word and anecdote feels meticulously placed. Whether we liken grief to a “sleeping bird or hollow boat,” these poems let us experience both the pain and possibility of loss, how we love a world so much larger than the one we are able to understand. This is a fabulous debut.

–Sally Keith, author of Two of Everything