Marissa Davis: “Though I was raised mostly in western Kentucky, my parents are from Ironton, Ohio, a small river town in the Appalachian foothills where most of my family still lives. In a way, the region is the ancestral home of my craft as much as my personhood—so much of my interest in poetry is born from an interest in music, and my conception of the rhythms of language is rooted in the particular cadences of my family’s speech: how vowels peak and flatten like the landscape, infusing any utterance with melody. In terms of theme, too, it holds its influence. The psychological and physical relationships of humans to land and environment is central to my work, and the physical spaces of my childhood—whether that’s the woods of my home, the hills and valleys of my parents’, or the Ohio River they both share—define the vocabulary of images I use to shape these conversations.” (web)
