Tore All to Pieces

Nestled in the mountains, in an out-of-the-way part of rural America, the fictional town of Mosely is home to ordinary people: proud, compassionate, and complex. Women serving biscuits at the gas station counter, nieces listening to Loretta Lynn with their uncles, teenage boys flirting with one another at prom, and parents busy raising their children's babies. This small community is woven together by family ties, church congregations, coal mines, and fast-food chains. Amidst these hills, the residents work hard to find belonging, love, and identity. _x000D_ Tore All to Pieces is a fragmented novel that delves into the lives of Appalachian characters whose struggles, backgrounds, and experiences intersect, and examines how interconnected yet lonely people can be. The different narratives, presented in the form of poems and stories, bend and weave like the roads of Appalachia. Each character's voice is richly portrayed through gripping and lyrical language, uniting in a quest for truth, genuine understanding, acknowledgement, and respect._x000D_ In a time when the rights of queer individuals, women, and people of color are increasingly under threat, this work powerfully re-affirms the humanity and significance of marginalized people. Tore All to Pieces underscores their enduring presence and rightful belonging.

About the Author :

Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr. is an Appalachian author, advocate, educator, and past Kentucky Teacher of the Year. His writing has appeared in a number of publications, including Appalachian Journal, the Louisville Review, Southern Humanities, Good River Review, and Salvation South. His debut collection, Gay Poems for Red States, was featured on Good Morning America and named a Book Riot Best Book, a Top Ten Over the Rainbow Book by the American Library Association, and a Whippoorwill Honor Book. A Stonewall Honor award recipient, Carver lives with his husband and three cats in rural Kentucky.

A wild emotional ride--I laughed, I cried, I wanted to smack certain characters. I couldn't wait to finish it and didn't want it to end. Poignant, funny, and full of humanity.

Powerful. Fun. Real. The characters feel like different kinds of people in a real world. I believed them. I believed in them. And the stories? Good-ass storytelling. Hammer down.

This is beautiful work. Carver's evocation of place renders Appalachia with a loving light that isn't afraid to unearth the rusty needles in the shadows behind the Go-Mart by the Fas-Check grocery store with the discount meat on Fridays. The novel is a drama of the everyday in working-class America--deciding whether to eat or get medicine, whether to trust the dealer, whether to love the abuser who isn't 100% evil (because no interesting character ever is). I fucking love the structure of the book: poems that dilate the narrative, prose that escalates drama. I think so many people will love this work.

This particular time in history demands artists and writers whose craft, courage, and heart are bigger than the moment. Willie Carver is one such writer. Tore All to Pieces is a trust exercise. Fall into its pages. The stories and poems will catch you with both hands.

Through Willie Carver's words, the stars have sound, cabbages speak love, and there is compassion for all.

To read Tore All to Pieces is to take a warm bath in the stillness of Appalachia, without anxiety about what this stillness might signify. Carver beckons us to submerge ourselves into what bell hooks calls 'the Kentucky backwoods, ' understanding Kentucky's hills and hollers as both a location of flight and the promised land of return. A site not of shame but of belonging, Carver's Appalachia is home to all.

We all know that Willie Carver is a superb poet. What this book demonstrates is that he's all that and a great short story writer as well. The poems and stories in Tore All to Pieces are a revelation: each a quiet, merciless gem that fits into a rich tapestry of the inhabitants of Mosely, Kentucky. This is an Appalachia beyond cliché, whose characters struggle through the everyday challenges of simply making do, and in so doing tap into universal themes of loneliness, desperation, self-determination, and love. In the short story 'Shooting Up Jesus, ' Carver turns the southern gothic romance on its head to tell the story of a queer hillbilly whose night of gay sex results in the literal upending of the Christ legend. In 'McDonald's Thanksgiving, ' a school cook working fast food on that holiday has her own heart wrecked by trying to be a parent to her drug-addled son. In 'Matching Tuxedos, ' what could have been a simple YA romance becomes, in Carver's hands, a moving depiction of young love unfolding in the face of time, memory, and the limits of our own broken world. Reading Tore All to Pieces not only will deeply move you, but it will help you find your way back to feeling whole and human again. Bravo, Willie Carver!

Willie Carver is brilliant. Tore All to Pieces continues the work of exploring Appalachia as it is and not as it is poorly imagined. Too often Appalachia is collapsed into either a degrading polemic of 'those people' to soothe the soul of the wealthy and powerful when confronted with poverty in the region, or it is forced into an uplifting ascension narrative that is more uncritical cheerleader than honest engagement. Carver rejects both rhetorical ruts, and we are the richer for it. Appalachia, and regional literature, has found a poet worthy of the task of telling a slice of our many stories honestly, tenderly, and compassionately.

Willie Carver writes with deep understanding of the hill culture, its vernacular, and specific details of place. This book is brimful with compassion, a quality we all need now more than ever.