I remember thinking,

I am from a place where I can always hear a train.

then thinking

Oh-

I am from a place.

Intricate, expansive, and darkly clever, Hackles is a collection of poems that combs every bit of its landscape. Rooted in Appalachia (and sometimes flying over and away), Makayla Danielle Gay's debut collection weighs confinement and freedom with a careful gaze.

The world of Hackles is teeming with creatures, textures, and sound. These poems creak with local folklore and looming violence; they wayfind with voice memos and stacks of stones. Everything hungers. Many things bloom. Cycles of rebirth and rot roll up and down its hills.

Hackles allows readers to immerse in Gay's Appalachia: to hear its background chatter, meet its living and its dead, to explore its directionless wild - and what lies beyond it.