Going Across the Water

Harry Humes carved out a unique place in American literature by chronicling Appalachian working-class life, natural landscapes, and disappearing rural traditions in Appalachian Pennsylvania with rare lyricism, humility, and precision. He wrote unflinchingly about the austerity and horrors of extraction as well as his deep connection with family and the area mountains and valleys not gutted by the anthracite coal industry.

This volume of Humes’s new and selected poems not only preserves the work of a significant American poet, offering scholars, teachers, and general readers a generous overview of the clarity, beauty, craft, and emotional depth of his substantial body of work. It allows future generations to rediscover poetry that deepens our understanding of how our labor, our landscapes, and our love shape us and change the ways we live and what we care about.