Professor publishes 1st full-length poetry book

South Carolina Author, and University of South Carolina Aiken Assistant Professor, Amanda Rachelle Warren’s debut full-length poetry collection has been released this month by Kentucky’s Finishing Line Press. This collection of poetry grapples with place (literal and metaphorical) and its corresponding struggles, traumas, triumphs, and joys, while exploring themes of identity, transformation, voice, and the sacred rituals that shape our lives.

Warren’s collection, divided into five “ritual” sections, explores the tensions between self, place, past, and desire. Despite being focused on an Appalachian identity and voice, the poems in this collection highlight the struggle each of us face when it comes to our personal experiences with belonging, identity, community, and heritage. 

Poet Ray McManus, author of Punch, and The Last Saturday in America, says of Rituals that "these poems explore the ritual of memory in the collective, the personal, and often traumatic. Here, we find the poet looking for a way to connect the constant rivers that run through the bramble and honeysuckle of this world to understand the cruelty and sublimity of both God and man, of both past and present, of both earth and waterway. And like rivers, here, “each wound is an old wound; each new song repeats the refrain of an older song which is never a lullaby.” And we are all victims to the drowning, or we’re saved by it as it washes us over and takes what it takes so that we might give. There is grace in these poems, there is reverence. And there is a light that can only be found if we are willing to search for it in the darkness. Truly, this is a stunning collection."

Warren is a native of Ohio with family and cultural roots in Appalachia but has lived and worked in South Carolina since 2008. Warren's poetry and non-fiction have appeared in Tusculum Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Appalachian Heritage, Anderbo, the Beloit Poetry Journal, and other journals. Warren received their master’s in creative writing from Ohio University and their doctorate in creative writing with a focus on poetry and Appalachian literature from Western Michigan University. Their chapbook, Ritual no.3: For the Exorcism of Ghosts, was selected by Kwame Dawes as a winner of the 2009 South Carolina Poetry Initiative Chapbook Competition and was published by Stepping Stone Press in 2010. They are the 2017 recipient of the Nickens Poetry Fellowship from the South Carolina Academy of Authors and have recently been featured in Lamar University Press' Southern Voices: 50 Contemporary Poets.

Rituals for to Call Down Light can be ordered online at www.finishinglinepress.com. Also available on amazon.com. $22.99 retail, 82 pages, paper and digital, ISBN:  979-8-88838-621-7

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