Books
Awkward Scrapes
Awkward Scrapes is a collection of poems that celebrates love, family, fatherhood, and the natural world while confronting grief, violence, memory, and healing. Rooted in Appalachia and Kentucky landscapes, Eric Scott Sutherland's lyrical, music-infused poems seek beauty, tenderness, and hope amid the awkward scrapes of being human. "The poems in Awkward Scrapes are the best kinds of love songs, never sentimental and always powerful. They are meditations on romantic love, on the profound connections we have with our children and the natural world, even on life itself. This book is a celebration of all that makes us human: the awfulness and the beauty, sometimes tangled. Sutherland is one of my favorite poets and I loved every carefully chosen yet organic word."—Silas House
Fathers
"True to his title, there are many fathers (along with a few prominent women) celebrated here, foremost his own father Joe Howard "Buzz" Taylor, as well as ancestors like Reuben Taylor, first of his Kentucky line, surrogate fathers including his Uncle Louis and best friend David Orr, and his son, now a father himself, continuing the generational saga. But recalling that the child is father of the man, the chief reason to welcome this book is for the insights it affords into Taylor's early life story, including nostalgic accounts of his childhood in and around Louisville, Kentucky. Taylor says this may be as close to an autobiography as he is apt to write, which is all the more reason to cherish these sketches from the life of a true Kentucky literary treasure."—Larry W. Moore