Sara Robinson has written a fierce and moving lament for all that has been taken - from the people, from their communities, and from the mountains themselves. - BARBARA FREESE, environmental attorney, energy policy analyst, and author the New York Times Notable Book, COAL: A Human HistorySara Robinson's new poetry collection, Needville, is reminiscent of Edgar Lee Master's Spoon River Anthology, an elegy for a fictional place. Robinson's small coal-mining community is a hard, dark world, and the people of this world are memorialized in their struggles, as beautiful and rugged as the mountains around them. Both the townsfolk and the Appalachianmountains "give birth, / but it is rough, not pretty -- /furious, helpless & everlasting." With these poems Robinson asks to not look away from the high price extracted with each load of coal, to see that "Truth is a river/that coils around trees & stumps/clear as coal is black." - RITA SIMS QUILLEN, author of Wayland and The Mad Farmer's WifeSo many voices smolder in Sara Robinson's ambitious new collection. Evoking a fictional coal town named Needville, she channels exploited miners; dying canaries; guilty consumers of coal-fueled electricity; and even the voices of mountains themselves. "How are poets like geologists?" one poem asks. Robinson's answer is to take the long view, probing the mighty forces that shape us. This powerful book treats its subject with precision, compassion, and not a little fire. - LESLEY WHEELER, author of Radioland and The State She's In, Henry S. Fox Professor of English, Poetry Editor of Shenandoah, Washington & Lee University