Barefoot Up the Mountain

“Barefoot Up the Mountain is a book of songs anchored in family, war, loss and displacement. Every poem is scaled in tongues of land and language, where the reader is instructed to “[b]ring / the light for no reason / but to bring it.” In these pages, we are guided by sound and image—a knowing voice, a traveled voice. We are made tender by such turns “in the half-light of half-dark,” in places so brief they stretch us further into the fields as we dream up the mountain.”

— Khaty Xiong, author of Poor Anima