About Tera Vale Ragan
Tera Vale Ragan received her MFA at San Francisco State where she was a poetry editor of Fourteen Hills and winner of the Mark Linenthal Award. She is currently a poetry editor for Rattapallax Magazine. Her poems have appeared in journals including Rattle, Transfer, Eclipse, and Ekleksographia. She spends her summers writing in Prague, Czech Republic.
Praise for Reading the Ground
Reading the Ground is a rich feast of poems relating to the poet’s Slovakian heritage, structured over historical time. It begins with the proposal of her grandfather by tossing a silk handkerchief at his sweetheart’s feet. While the wedding guests dance a czardas, there’s a terrible act of violence, followed by ritual revenge, imprisonment, and migration to the Duquesne area of Pittsburgh aboard the Aquitania. This is eloquent, moving, and necessary poetry.
—Paul Hoover, author of In Idiom and Earth
These poems give us “Lessons in the Slovak Language”—which is to say, lessons in every mother’s tongue. They rise out of the great American tale of immigration, embrace the great American mill-town of the 20th century, and make the great American journey to an unknown old country. Ragan’s consummately woven text is a 21st century book: a brilliant meta-poem; a double-helix of artful words; a gathering that satisfies, sings, erupts.
—Jeanne Larsen, author of Why We Make Gardens
With feet planted on ancestral soil, this young American poet celebrates roots, landscape, custom, kinship, émigré culture, storytelling, language and life. As our earliest ancestors read rivers, foliage, clouds and the heavens, so Ragan reads and re-imagines the Slovak heritage that fuels her bloodline. In its originality, artfulness, and downright soulfulness, Reading the Ground is an adventure and a joy to read.
—Al Young, Poet Laureate for California 2005-2008
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