The Girl Who Wants to Walk Here

“The Girl Who Wants to Walk Here” is a collection of poems written before, during, and after the author’s return to the natural spaces of the American Midwest and Upper South where she spent her early childhood. Retracing the Mississippi river from both St. Louis and Southern Illinois, the lakes of Western Kentucky, the forests of Missouri, and the Ozark Mountains, it explores the effects of memory and revisitation on the powerful connections we form with our environments; what it is to experience place, what it is to remember place, and what it means to construct a geography of the self — to incorporate regions into our identities as completely and irrevocably as we do stories, memories, and those we love.