After a lifetime of writing, poet, writer, journalist, photographer and podcaster Kevin Nance publishes a full-length collection of longer poems. Accents Publishing is proud to present Smoke, an immersive and evocative, celebratory and heartbreaking journey towards a life of authenticity, personal values and hard-earned freedom. What Others Say About Smoke
Kevin Nance's Smoke is a major literary achievement, from a voice distinctly Southern and at the same time universal in its themes of longing, memory, and love for the created world in all its manifestations. Such a delight to read poems from a fellow farm boy! I hear echoes of W. H. Auden and Maurice Manning, another great Kentucky poet. Nance's poems are tender, poignant, elegiac, and at the same time as invigorating as any honest engagement with the past—the real past, the authentic past—should be.
—Fenton Johnson, author of Scissors, Paper, Rock
Kevin Nance's collection is one of threat and peace, weaving rattlesnakes and pecan trees, hunger and God, a failing farm and photographing a stranger dancing in the street. Like many great collections before it, Smoke examines love, loss, and home, and does so in expansive, unique, and unforgettable ways. These poems are ones to be savored.
—Melissa Helton, author of Hewn Smoke is a ferociously honest reckoning with hungers and survival: what feeds us, what sustains us, and what we do to keep going, even as the poet determines that "even limestone is no match for the lathe of eternity." Using an adroit mix of poetic forms, including his signature haiku, Kevin Nance's poems seize the physical, emotional, and sexual hungers in this collection. From a tobacco farm in North Carolina where both the brightleaf tobacco leaves and the poet's father's face are "veined, tanned, supple, creased," to the cityscapes of Lexington, Kentucky, these vivid poems, as the title poem depicts, will "circle your head like a wreath."
—Marianne Worthington, author of The Girl Singer
The poems in Kevin Nance's Smoke reveal well-crafted lines, chiseled and polished from mastering the art of the haiku. They are matted and framed by beautifully developed, stopped and fixed images that appear like old-school prints floating up through the surface of water. Poems like "Horse Capital," for example, sing with more honesty and hopefulness than Kentucky's actual state song. This satisfying collection opens as a tobacco-scented Bildungsroman, loses its innocence by easing into love poems with exquisite lines like "a duvet filled with the feathers of each other's breath," and moves across a life well lived into mature poems such as "Wilmington," revealing the world in all its ugliness and color.
—Frank X Walker, author of Love House
First Light
Dew collects on the tobacco leaves,
dripping on the sandlugs
at the bottom of the stalks,
waking up the rattlesnakes.
Pecan trees sleepwalk in the orchard,
their branches splayed
like the arms of God
banishing the void with a wave.
In the house, a boy is dreaming
of his mother & father
standing in a field of tobacco,
growing smaller & smaller
as he leaves them behind.
He shifts in the sheets, wanting to weep
but not knowing why. The porch swing
swings at the slightest breeze.
Details and Ordering
Publication Date: July 15, 2025
Format: Softcover, 6" x 9"
ISBN: 978-1-961127-17-3
Price: $19.00
About the Author
Kevin Nance is a writer, photographer and arts journalist. A North Carolinian, he was educated at Duke University and has lived for many years in Lexington, Kentucky. His poems have appeared in many literary journals including Cumberland Poetry Review, which awarded him the Robert Penn Warren Poetry Prize, judged by Helen Vendler, in 2003. His two collections of photographs and haiku are Even If (University of Kentucky Arts in HealthCare, 2020) and Midnight (Act of Power Press, 2022). His book of photographs, Geneva's Garden: Four Seasons of Beauty in Lexington's Gratz Park, was published in 2024. As an arts journalist, his work has been published in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, Poets & Writers Magazine and other publications. He is co-host (with Jay McCoy) of Kentucky Writers Roundtable, a literary interview program on RadioLex. His photography can be seen at kevinnance.tumblr.com.
After a lifetime of writing, poet, writer, journalist, photographer and podcaster Kevin Nance publishes a full-length collection of longer poems. Accents Publishing is proud to present Smoke, an immersive and evocative, celebratory and heartbreaking journey towards a life of authenticity, personal values and hard-earned freedom.