Becoming Mary: A Split-Tongue Reckoning in Verse - Paperback

by Mary Dent (Author)

"Somewhere in the beginning, affection arrived with a ledger."

In the deep hollows of Appalachia, silence isn't quiet. It breathes. It remembers. And eventually, it shatters.

Becoming Mary is a fierce, Southern Gothic reckoning told in raw, split-tongue verse. This is not a postcard of the mountains; it is an excavation of a country built on inheritance and fracture. Here, family names arrive like a blessing and a warning in the same breath. Girlhood is a lesson learned in dim rooms and borrowed light, where love and harm are braided into the very same thread.

Moving through the wreckage of trauma, addiction, family, love, healing, and religious weight, these poems map a living weather system of the soul. Nothing arrives cleanly. Nothing leaves untouched.

But beneath the coal-dark devotion and the kitchens that remember every hunger lies a persistent, dangerous tenderness. This is a refusal to be reduced to ruin. This is what happens when a burden long carried is finally set down-and the world refuses to end.

"Healing began

when I stopped

collecting debts."

For anyone who has ever loved a place or tried to make a home in people they couldn't fully survive, Becoming Mary offers a lantern for the long walk home.

"Stunning. Seriously, some of the best poetry I've read in a long time...evocative, and carrying emotions a reader has to unpack." - Ellen Hopkins, New York Times bestselling author of Crank