“In Appalachian Picture Book, Dee Stribling digs deeply not only into her beloved Appalachian terrain, but also into the promise memory makes to the heart: to never forget. Every cherished moment is stilled, just like in a picture book, where we see in pristine detail “a single sagebrush cane / [clinging] to frozen windowpane,” and “crevices in rock faces waiting for / tears to wash them free in a flood of /mud and gravel and roughness.” This poet’s ear is to the earth and her language mimes that music, whether it’s ballad, madrigal, folk idiom – even her often brash speaker in a white Barracuda, “holding her sideways into a turn” … “taking that Hurst shifter where it wants / to go an’ where you ain’t never been.” This book has range and soul – a voice that will take you anywhere you want to go.

–Joseph Bathanti, former NC Poet Laureate

In Dee Stribling‘s Appalachian Picture Book, the hills are filled with a quiet beauty that is at times as ominous as it is picturesque. These poems never settle but quiver like memory and “blue smoke com[ing] across the field.”

–Erin Elizabeth Smith (Sundress Publishing)