Smoke
Kevin Nance · July 2025
After a lifetime of writing, poet, writer, journalist, photographer and podcaster Kevin Nance publishes a full-length collection of longer poems. Smoke is an immersive and evocative, celebratory and heartbreaking journey towards a life of authenticity, personal values and hard-earned freedom. "Kevin Nance's Smoke is a major literary achievement, from a voice distinctly Southern and at the same time universal in its themes of longing, memory, and love for the created world in all its manifestations. Such a delight to read poems from a fellow farm boy! I hear echoes of W. H. Auden and Maurice Manning, another great Kentucky poet. Nance's poems are tender, poignant, elegiac, and at the same time as invigorating as any honest engagement with the past—the real past, the authentic past—should be."—Fenton Johnson
