Going Across the Water

New and Selected Poems of Harry Humes

Harry Humes, Daniel Donaghy

• Publisher: Swallow Press
• Year: 2026
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9780804012683
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Harry Humes carved out a unique place in American literature by chronicling Appalachian working-class life, natural landscapes, and disappearing rural traditions in Appalachian Pennsylvania with rare lyricism, humility, and precision. He wrote unflinchingly about the austerity and horrors of extraction as well as his deep connection with family and the area mountains and valleys not gutted by the anthracite coal industry.

This volume of Humes’s new and selected poems not only preserves the work of a significant American poet, offering scholars, teachers, and general readers a generous overview of the clarity, beauty, craft, and emotional depth of his substantial body of work. It allows future generations to rediscover poetry that deepens our understanding of how our labor, our landscapes, and our love shape us and change the ways we live and what we care about.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Harry Humes Biography
• Harry Humes Bibliography
• Foreword
• Born from Anthracite
• Harry Humes’s Appalachia
• from Winter Weeds, Devins Award Winner, University of Missouri Press, 1983
• from Robbing the Pillars, chapbook, Adastra Press, 1984
• from Throwing Away the Compass, chapbook, Silverfish Review Press, 1986
• from Ridge Music, University of Arkansas Press, 1987
• from A Weather of Surprises, chapbook, Heatherstone Press, 1988
• from The Way Winter Works, University of Arkansas Press, 1990
• from Evening in the Small Park, Owl Creek Press, 1992
• from The Bottomland, University of Arkansas Press, 1995
• from Butterfly Effect, National Poetry Series Winner, Milkweed Editions, 1999
• from August Evening with Trumpet, University of Arkansas Press, 2004
• from Underground Singing, Keystone Chapbook Series, Seven Kitchens Press, 2007
• from All Waters Are One, chapbook, Adastra Press, 2014
• from Witness Marks (unpublished book manuscript)
• from A Memory of Silkworms (unpublished chapbook manuscript)
• Uncollected Poems, 1976–2013
• Talking About Girardville
• Acknowledgments
• Poem Title Index