Distant Relations by Cheryl Whitehead is a profound and evocative exploration of family ties, identity, and the search for belonging across generations and geographies.
 
In this wise and intimate debut collection, Whitehead delves into the intricacies of familial relationships, weaving together threads of memory, displacement, cultural heritage, and the persistent quest for connection. Through a series of vivid, lyrical narratives, Whitehead introduces us to a cast of characters bound by blood yet separated by time, distance, and unspoken tensions.
 
As Whitehead guides us through the landscapes of past and present, she reveals the subtle ways in which identity is shaped by the echoes of our ancestors and the environments we inhabit. We witness the weight of inherited traumas and the ways in which love and duty can both bind and isolate. Through her compassionate and unflinching words, Whitehead invites the reader to reflect on the ties that define us and the spaces in between that often go unspoken.
 
Distant Relations is a meditation on the complexities of kinship, the pain of separation, and the enduring hope for reconciliation. Whitehead's narrative is at once deeply personal and universally resonant, offering a powerful testament to the bonds that connect us all, no matter how far apart we may seem.
 
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"Distant Relations is an anti-pastoral evocation of rural NC, a sort of country Kind of Blue built on the rigorous complexity of carefully wrought meter and rhyme. Within this vast, subtle lyric multiverse, plainspoken, austere motifs emerge and re-merge—horses, scarecrows, trailers, muscadines, fog, stars, fields—circling back, always circling back to human pain and mute yearning, yes, but also the redemptive mystery of nature and love. These are “assemblage” poems as well—like the work of Southern artist Thornton Dial (who has a poem “after” him in the collection)—that are all “junk pile/& brushfire,” making of ruins the sublime.
 
In this utterly original (and transcendently regional) examination of both geographic and familial history, Cheryl Whitehead has found “a delicate way/to be conscious.” Resonant images reverberate against one another, koans of a junky yet beautiful landscape, and a personal history presented with both tenderness and fearless unsentimentality, “a sweetness/through ghosts/& weeds.”
 
—Annie Woodford, Author of Bootleg (Groundhog Poetry Press, 2019), finalist for Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry.
 
 
"Cheryl Whitehead’s Distant Relations reveals what remains in the quiet after the actors have left the stage. I love how these poems —with their keen senses and attunement to beauty—invite me into their world, 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, essayist, and co-founder of The School for Living Futures
 
 
"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, essayist, poet, and playwright
 
 
"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: Twenty-six Views of The Peak