Proud Roads: Poems in the Aftermath of Hurricane Helene

When Hurricane Helene tore through Southern Appalachia, it left behind more than toppled trees and broken bridges—it rewrote the map of what it means to belong.

In Proud Roads, Kelly Riedesel chronicles the storm’s long wake: the hundred-year-old elders uprooted overnight, the X marks of rescue teams still on front doors, the way “every gust of wind, every snapping branch” startles the body long after the rain stops. Moving through prose-poems, lyric fragments, and echoes of Indigenous storytelling, Riedesel holds space for the uncounted losses—dignity buried in makeshift shelters, roads “rendered flesh at the bottom of chasms”—while also charting the routes back to each other.

Here, survival is not just a matter of endurance, but of care: the neighbor with a chainsaw clearing your way out, the mules carrying supplies over washed-out hollers, the children “watching what care looks like” in real time. Even in the face of climate trauma, Proud Roads insists on the roads—both physical and spiritual—that hold a community together:

“We are flooding back love, standing up when we can, without comment,

sitting down when we must, without guilt, doing the things that keep us proud.”

On the first anniversary of the storm, these poems serve as an artifact and an offering—proof that the proud roads of this place are still here, still carrying those who walk them.