Description
Interior with Poplar
Poems by Leatha Kendrick
ISBN: 978-1-963695-75-5 paperback $19.95
ISBN: 978-1-963695-76-2 ebook $9.99
September 15, 2026
Threaded with rivers, birds, and trees, Interior with Poplar addresses transience and resilience—the desire to lay everything down set against the will to go on. In this collection, Leatha Kendrick alternately celebrates the deep joys of a long marriage and the equal imperative of separateness and solitude. The poems in Interior with Poplar render roles the poet takes up and abandons, places she loves and leaves, and aging as shadow and as light, landing with jubilation in uncertainty.
Praise for Interior with Poplar: Poems by Leatha Kendrick
In Leatha Kendrick’s deft hands, the poplar tree stands as witness, sentinel, and placeholder to these resonant, rooted poems of love and memory. In these expertly crafted poems—opulent in sound and cohesive in imagery—the poet discovers a nexus of longevity and endurance by offering up the wisest “words that rise / through silence.”—Marianne Worthington, author of The Girl Singer
The poems of Interior with Poplar are deep & dazzling, personal & cosmic. Writing through yet another of life’s awkward ages, Kendrick looks back to where & who she has been & forward to the unknown, unplannable future. She gives us a testimony to this time of life, “this layering of loves” & questions as our children & grandchildren grow on without us, though, like trees, we still feed them through our roots.—George Ella Lyon, Kentucky Poet Laureate, 2015-2016, and author of Back to the Light
Verse memoir, chronicle of a happy marriage, reflection on the passage of time, a study of poplars from the writer’s window—Leatha Kendrick’s Interior with Poplar is all of these things and more. They fulfill Jane Hirshfield’s expectations of a good poem: “A good poem, then, is a solvent, a kind of WD-40 for the soul.”—Richard Taylor, Kentucky Poet Laureate, 1999-2001, and author of Elkhorn, Evolution of a Kentucky Landmark
Interior with Poplar is a life-study where we travel with Leatha Kendrick through many of the houses that have made up her own life. We read Kendrick and we learn how to love the world, love others, and love ourselves better.—Jeremy Paden, author of How to Recognize God’s Chosen
Writer, teacher, and editor, Leatha Kendrick received the 2025 Judy Gaines Young Award, recognizing a body of work by an author from the Appalachian region. Author of five poetry collections, Kendrick’s recent poems and scholarly articles appear in Still: The Journal, Kansas City Review, Good River Review, Hood of Bone Review, and Appalachian Journal. Essays and poems also are gathered in the Anthology of Appalachian Writers, Volume XVII; Troublesome Rising: A Thousand-Year Flood in Eastern Kentucky; The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume III: Contemporary Appalachia; and What Comes Down to Us: Twenty-Five Contemporary Kentucky Poets.
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