Smoke to See By

"Foremost Appalachian essayist Ben Moyer does not take for granted Emerson's adage that for everything you gain, you lose something else. The sensuous prose here, in his finest writing on place-actually the finest literature on place in the northern Appalachian idiom-confronts us with how our losses exceed society's yardstick for gain the more we tune out the miracles at work in this book's simplest, lovingly evoked experiences: tasting the juicy lusciousness of a homegrown tomato; seeing the hourly theatrics of the ridges in our periphery; feeling the cycles of our earth through the bracing scratches of blackberry thorns, to name a few. Ben Moyer's calling is to tune our senses to the gifts of people and places that are slipping irrevocably away. Recover them here, in these sacred pages...PJ Piccirillo, founding editor, the Northern Appalachia Review and author of The Indigo Scarf and Nunc Stans: A Ferry Tale ""Ben Moyer's stories are always pleasurable adventures to read. He brings a depth of experience, an eye for exquisite detail and an intimate human touch that not only place the reader in the scene and the thick of the action but also convey the mature and nuanced understanding he's gained over decades. We are able to absorb the benefit of his experience, but with his light touch as a writer, it's as if we're there ourselves, taking in images, people and lessons of life on our own terms.""...Douglas Heuck, Editor, Pittsburgh Quarterly"