Publication Date: August 15, 2026
Paperback, 118 pages
ISBN: 978-1-966677-44-4
Bent Cedar Mountain takes us deep into the Appalachians (“They drove past the gas station / ...for five more miles of gravel / up Bent Cedar Mountain, / flanked thick with mountain laurel.”) and deeper into the lives of Grace and Nohl (“his wife held the boy’s body / close, held him for too many / minutes – until the silence in the room felt like something that would fill their lungs.”) A novel in verse, this work by Julie Hensley traces the sad, poignant, and often violent lives of its protagonists, “craving the weight of her hips, the scent of her unwashed hair, some sign / she is still real and alive, still his wife.” Caught between tradition and progress, their marriage unfurls like a fiddlehead fern in the mountain spring.
Praise for Julie Hensley & Bent Cedar Mountain
Julie Hensley’s Bent Cedar Mountain is a brilliant and beguiling poetic enacting novel-in-verse. This one is a fiery and fluid winner, a fascinating narrative lyric recalling iconic American works like The Blainville Testament by the great poet/novelist Sydney Lea. Incredibly, Bent Cedar Mountain delivers a plot-driven poetic in scintillating passages, vignettes demanding our engagement in rendering the lives impressing one another in the land rich with life and loss, a “boy // was born without breath // shadows ringing eyes // tight as fists, lips bruised-violet // and cavernous as the mouth of a fish…” Hensley carries us through the era with precise fascinations, “First the ocean rush // of the fetal heartbeat,// then rising suddenly from the gray // continents hovering //on the screen, her baby, // floating in the current // of her resolve // measuring…” Brings us to be intimate with “bark husked by the frantic // scratch of the dog's claws…against the dusky curtain of the injured // autumn sky…Whereas men's voices are jubilant // as they confer around a large paper- // covered table, wielding sharpened knives // and their own body weight to separate // the pig's skin and pull it toward the spine. // With their goggles and rubber gloves, // they have the look of mad scientists…” And she delights us in exceptional craft and deft wielding of content and subject through an intense poetic, steeped in a ragged and velveted home place. This book is at once delightful and a great escape. A must read, share, and return to read again. What a feat!
—Alison Hedge Coke, author of Look At This Blue
A marriage is a lot like a farm. It can be a place of tenderness—or it can be a place of cruelty. Reader, in your hands is a parable about how that choice sometimes gets taken from us, a careful tale that shows abuse takes hold quietly, through small, hidden brutalities that accumulate until you wake up one day so afraid there’s nothing left to find but courage. Writing with lush detail and exacting empathy, Julie Hensley proves with this collection that she is one of Appalachia’s premiere storytellers. Bent Cedar Mountain will break your heart.
—Rebecca Gayle Howell, author of Erase Genesis
About the Author
Julie Hensley is the author of three previous books, Five Oaks (Lake Union Publishing), Landfall: A Ring of Stories (Ohio State University Press), and Viable (Five Oaks Press). She is also the author of two chapbooks, Real World (Artists Thrive) and The Language of Horses (Finishing Line Press). A Professor at Eastern Kentucky University and core faculty member in the Bluegrass Writers Studio Low-Res MFA Program, she lives in Richmond with her husband, the writer R Dean Johnson, and their two children.
Publication Date: August 15, 2026
Paperback, 118 pages
ISBN: 978-1-966677-44-4
Bent Cedar Mountain takes us deep into the Appalachians (“They drove past the gas station / ...for five more miles of gravel / up Bent Cedar Mountain, / flanked thick with mountain laurel.”) and deeper into the lives of Grace and Nohl (“his wife held the boy’s body / close, held him for too many / minutes – until the silence in the room felt like something that would fill their lungs.”) A novel in verse, this work by Julie Hensley traces the sad, poignant, and often violent lives of its protagonists, “craving the weight of her hips, the scent of her unwashed hair, some sign / she is still real and alive, still his wife.” Caught between tradition and progress, their marriage unfurls like a fiddlehead fern in the mountain spring.
Praise for Julie Hensley & Bent Cedar Mountain
Julie Hensley’s Bent Cedar Mountain is a brilliant and beguiling poetic enacting novel-in-verse. This one is a fiery and fluid winner, a fascinating narrative lyric recalling iconic American works like The Blainville Testament by the great poet/novelist Sydney Lea. Incredibly, Bent Cedar Mountain delivers a plot-driven poetic in scintillating passages, vignettes demanding our engagement in rendering the lives impressing one another in the land rich with life and loss, a “boy // was born without breath // shadows ringing eyes // tight as fists, lips bruised-violet // and cavernous as the mouth of a fish…” Hensley carries us through the era with precise fascinations, “First the ocean rush // of the fetal heartbeat,// then rising suddenly from the gray // continents hovering //on the screen, her baby, // floating in the current // of her resolve // measuring…” Brings us to be intimate with “bark husked by the frantic // scratch of the dog's claws…against the dusky curtain of the injured // autumn sky…Whereas men's voices are jubilant // as they confer around a large paper- // covered table, wielding sharpened knives // and their own body weight to separate // the pig's skin and pull it toward the spine. // With their goggles and rubber gloves, // they have the look of mad scientists…” And she delights us in exceptional craft and deft wielding of content and subject through an intense poetic, steeped in a ragged and velveted home place. This book is at once delightful and a great escape. A must read, share, and return to read again. What a feat!
—Alison Hedge Coke, author of Look At This Blue
A marriage is a lot like a farm. It can be a place of tenderness—or it can be a place of cruelty. Reader, in your hands is a parable about how that choice sometimes gets taken from us, a careful tale that shows abuse takes hold quietly, through small, hidden brutalities that accumulate until you wake up one day so afraid there’s nothing left to find but courage. Writing with lush detail and exacting empathy, Julie Hensley proves with this collection that she is one of Appalachia’s premiere storytellers. Bent Cedar Mountain will break your heart.
—Rebecca Gayle Howell, author of Erase Genesis
About the Author
Julie Hensley is the author of three previous books, Five Oaks (Lake Union Publishing), Landfall: A Ring of Stories (Ohio State University Press), and Viable (Five Oaks Press). She is also the author of two chapbooks, Real World (Artists Thrive) and The Language of Horses (Finishing Line Press). A Professor at Eastern Kentucky University and core faculty member in the Bluegrass Writers Studio Low-Res MFA Program, she lives in Richmond with her husband, the writer R Dean Johnson, and their two children.
