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“What can we do but seek nectar where it blooms,” whispers the porous and questioning speaker of In the Hands of the River. In these haunting, layered poems, Lucien Darjeun Meadows affirms the interconnection of human and environmental identity. With delicate precision, In the Hands of the River subverts traditional poetic forms to show how a childhood for a queer boy of both Cherokee and European heritage happens within and outside dominant narratives of Appalachia.This debut collection weaves ancestral and personal threads of trauma, reclamation, and survival into a multi-generational and multi-species tapestry that reaches from the distant stars visible in an Appalachian holler to the curl of a clover stem and the touch of the beloved, here and now. Moving across time, yet always grounded in place, these poems address the West Virginian landscape, both in exaltation and extraction, balanced with poems about the speaker's own body, and emergent sense of queer identity, as “a boy made of shards.”
"In the Hands of the River is a stunning and harrowing debut collection. With exquisite attention, Lucien Darjeun Meadows draws us deeply into an Appalachian landscape where 'mountains rub their shoulders blue / With horizon and a father's scent is an 'open parenthesis of ginseng and smoke.' These poems are so vivid and unflinching, and so richly intertwined with the elements. I felt the title's promise at every turn: held by the river of Meadows' language, carried into music and truth, carving a way toward 'the thrill of light.'" —Chloe Honum, author of The Lantern Room