Carol Parris Krauss

The Old Folks Call It God’s Country is full of love and transitions: old bridges, old houses with too-small replacement windows that block the mountain views, old memories that slide into the present. We meet Krauss’s grandfather, an alcoholic, but the standout image in his poem is a beautiful window full of brightly colored bottles—stained glass, really. And there is a wonderful lament about a small crop of winter lettuce, ruined by a cold snap. This is a book of the rural Carolinas with their mountain streams, homegrown corn, and Dollar Stores, where men are gifted the tools but women put the household wheels in motion. These allusive poems, with references to Jane Kenyon and Eudora Welty, create a kind of liminal space, a pause for reflection between a little girl’s miserable corrective shoes and an older woman’s sore hip. Carol Krauss can see bullets in red rubber pencil erasers, but also finds grace on mountain tops and a cruise downtown to the old Courthouse. I call shotgun!