| Our only sin was being born where we were. And not giving up on
a land that often spited us.
Pain and anger resonate deeply in the voice of New Covenant
Bound's central narrator. Forced from her homeland
on the Tennessee River in the 1930s, she recounts the
memory of upheaval and destruction caused by the Tennessee
Valley Authority.
The western Kentucky area that now boasts beautiful,
expansive bodies of water was once home to the houses,
farms, townships, and ancestral history of some 20,000
people. Residents were subjected to three waves of
forced relocation to make way for Kentucky Lake in the
1930s, Lake Barkley in the 1950s, and Land Between the
Lakes National Recreation Area in the 1960s.
Renowned poet T. Crunk intersperses narrative prose and
lyric verse to explore the devastation one family experienced
in this often-overlooked episode in Kentucky history.
The voices of a grandmother and grandson speak to
each other across time, evoking the relentless advance of
irrevocable forces that changed the land forever.
T. Crunk, winner of the 1994 Yale Series of Younger
Poets prize and writer-in-residence at the Alabama Writers'
Forum "Writing our Stories" project, is the author
of Living in the Resurrection and Parables and Revelations. He
lives in Birmingham, Alabama.
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