Rigging a Chevy Into a Time Machine and Other Ways to Escape a Plague

Carolyn Hembree's second poetry collection, Rigging a Chevy into a Time Machine and Other Ways to Escape a Plague, was selected by Neil Shepard for the 2015 Trio Award and by Stephanie Strickland for the 2015 Marsh Hawk Press Rochelle Ratner Memorial Award. The book is a sequence of poems arranged like a truck owner's manual. Set in rural Appalachia, "a truck up on concrete blocks" functions as time machine for V. Cleb, an accursed wanderer trapped and liberated by the limits of his world. When spiritual and material realms commingle, visions of cosmic significance are revealed. Biblical cadences, elliptical phrasing, and a deep-rooted vernacular distinguish the voice of these poems. "Through wormhole after wormhole," the book inscribes a landscape visceral, haunted, afflicted, afflicting.