Earth Is My Church

Poetry January 2020 ISBN 978-1-936628-54-4 72 pages Softcover, 6" x 9"

Earth Is My Church is the second Eric Sutherland book published by Accents. While in Pendulum, he focused on people and their life stories, here the author immerses the reader in the natural world. These are poems of connection and significance, vision and enlightenment.
"Earth Is My Church is a lament for 'the beauty / and balance … before / bulldozers came to scrape / the treasure chest clean' and hope that 'another generation will be able / to sit under old growth / and sing songs by fire light.'"—Joe Survant

From the Book

Kentucky Is My Body

I am a graveyard
a farm converting crops
to cement
a barn who lost the gift of tobacco
still stained with its scent

my aroma: sour mash
coal burning power plants
wildflower blooms and natural gas
redbuds, magnolias

I am cigarette smoke and cancer
strip malls like sunspots on a burned back
another and another
and another
church
acres and acres churned up
in the worship of money

Kentucky
is
my body

I am sweet water
sinking through skin to limestone
bone, a circulatory system
pushing blood through veins
beyond dams and stints
clots of plaque, cans and plastic

I am black lungs
bellowing the song my granny
sung over a hot stove while mashing
potatoes pulled from garden ground
before any future conversion
to cul-de-sac

I am a crooked spine
of knobs and mountaintops
centered only by serpentine
sway of back roads, my soul
where front porch stories
still echo

Kentucky
is
my body

and I am a gun rack
locked in a spare bedroom
where quilts lay spread
across peaceful beds

What Others Say

Despite our current set of crises and the disarray we know will come sooner than later, this is a book that refuses despair. Citing plants and trees and geographies by name, the poems in this book affirm where our hope must lie—in the holy earth, in the loving land that sustains the human experience and, in fact, defines us and gives us reason to be, whether we are poets or school teachers. By naming the place of our hope, and not just for the human, but for all of life, these vibrant and stark poems imply our responsibilities. The responsibilities are great, yet this fine book is a call to action and togetherness in purpose. In a time of sorrow and doubt, this is a book of hope, and also a song for us to hear and to follow.

— Maurice Manning

Earth Is My Church is a lament for "the beauty / and balance … before / bulldozers came to scrape / the treasure chest clean" and hope that "another generation will be able / to sit under old growth / and sing songs by fire light." Writers like Eric Scott Sutherland make that hope seem more possible.

— Joe Survant

There are a few books of poetry that can change, if not your life, your way of living on this earth, make you more aware of and more grateful for what is sacred, more determined to protect what is left of that sacredness. This book is one of them. "The whole time," Eric writes, "I was in conversation with God." And I believe it. This is a holy book, full of love, rage, and hope.

— Mary Ann Taylor-Hall

About the Author

Eric Scott Sutherland

Poet Laureate of Al's Bar and creator of the legendary Holler Poets Series, Eric Scott Sutherland is the author of six collections of poetry including Earth Is My Church and Pendulum. His poems have been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Earth Is My Church was nominated for the 2020 Weatherford Award for Appalachian book of the year. He lives and works to protect trees as Urban Forester in Lexington, Kentucky.