Cover image of the book "Distant Relations" published by Loblolly Press, featuring abstract artwork and title text.
Cover image of the book "Distant Relations" by Loblolly Press from the 2025 collection, featuring abstract artwork and title text.
Distant Relations

Distant Relations

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In this intimate debut, Cheryl Whitehead gathers the people and places of Snow Camp, North Carolina — horses named Oliver, tin buckets, fog in the fields, the language of mothers and grandmothers — and makes them stay. These poems circle back: to human pain and mute yearning, yes, but also to the redemptive mystery of nature and love.

Whitehead writes from the inside of familial tension without resolving it. Memory here is not nostalgic — it is a reckoning. Identity forms in relation to ancestors who walked difficult roads and didn't all survive them, and to environments that shaped what was possible. The result is a collection that feels at once deeply personal and communally held.

Distant Relations is a debut from a poet whose voice has been formed over decades of careful attention — to land, to family, to the way things get passed down whether we ask for them or not.

Cheryl Whitehead is a teacher, musician, and poet from Snow Camp, North Carolina. Her chapbook,So Ghosts Might Stop Composing is available from Finishing Line Press. Her poems have appeared in Mezzo Cammin, The Hopkins Review, Crab Orchard Review and other journals. She has been a finalist for the New Letters and Morton Marr Poetry Prizes and the Unicorn Press First Book Award. She won an emerging artist grant from the Astraea Foundation and received scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Quest Writers’ Conference and the North Carolina Writers’ Network. She currently teaches English at the Chatham Early College in Siler City, NC.

Praise

Distant Relations is an anti-pastoral evocation of rural North Carolina, a sort of country Kind of Blue built on the rigorous complexity of carefully wrought meter and rhyme. Plainspoken motifs emerge and re-merge—horses, scarecrows, trailers, muscadines, fog, fields—always circling back to human pain and mute yearning, but also to the redemptive mystery of nature and love. In this utterly original examination of geographic and familial history, Cheryl Whitehead has found "a delicate way / to be conscious."
— Annie Woodford, author of Bootleg
Cheryl Whitehead's Distant Relations reveals what remains in the quiet after the actors have left the stage. These poems—with their keen senses and attunement to beauty—invite me into the solitude of a crumbling, rural landscape teeming with nonhuman life. Each poem is a still life with movement, memory, and sublime music.
— Sarah Rose Nordgren, poet and essayist
Cheryl Whitehead's distant relations become ours, too, through her uncanny ability for storytelling through poetry. She is a conjurer of place and time. Her family of ongoing memories and observations is one we wish to join and stay with.
— David Masello, Executive Editor of Milieu magazine
In Distant Relations, Cheryl Whitehead chronicles Southern landscapes of family and loss. Whitehead is gifted with an artist's eye and a musician's ear. These poems have wings!
— Beth Copeland, author of Shibori Blue

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