Tell the fruit trees when the owner dies,folk wisdom advises. To go look up into limbs, muscular and weight-bearing, or where they’ve been broken, marked by scars in the shape of eyes— To face their mouthlessness and try to work your maw, with which you are supposed to to tell others the news— And then figure how to want to continue to breathe—This practiceis not for the sake of the trees.
Practice
Rose McLarney
Feature Date
Series
Selected By
Share This Poem
Print This Poem
“Practice” from COLORFAST: by Rose McLarney.
Published by Penguin Random House on March 5, 2024.
Copyright © 2024 by Rose McLarney.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Photo:
Lauren Beesley photography
Lauren Beesley photography
Rose McLarney’s poetry collections are Colorfast, Forage, and Its Day Being Gone, published by Penguin, as well as The Always Broken Plates of Mountains, from Four Way Books. Her book of lyric essays, Rubble Masonry, is forthcoming from LSU Press in March 2026. She is co-editor of A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia, from University of Georgia Press, and the journal Southern Humanities Review. Rose has won the National Poetry Series contest and received fellowships from MacDowell, Bread Loaf, and Sewanee, among other awards. Rose is Lanier Endowed Professor at Auburn University.
A haunting, intimate, and beautifully-crafted collection of poems rooted in southern Appalachia that reflects on loss and remembrance—and reaches beyond the constraints of time and place
“Rose McLarney writes in the lineage of Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Charles Wright, bell hooks, James Agee—Appalachian poets of precise vision, unafraid to live according to the land’s own slow and knowing time. In this new book McLarney takes us further, sustaining a vibrant intimacy with what our country dangerously dismisses as the past: the capacity to love and be loved by our specific, broken places and the ancestors that break our ground. Colorfast is magnificent. This is a book for anyone who has ever longed for a home, even when it hurts. In other words, this book is for us all.”
—Rebecca Gayle Howell, author of American Purgatory
Poetry Daily Depends on You
With your support, we make reading the best contemporary poetry a treasured daily experience. Consider a contribution today.
