Why We at Pulley Press Love Demon Copperhead

What Pulley Press aspires to—celebrating literature from from rural places—is what Barbara Kingsolver does masterfully in Demon Copperhead, her new novel. We absolutely love it—for its depiction of Appalachia as a real and nuanced place, and for its main character, Demon, an orphan with a big voice. 

Kingsolver says she was setting out to “write the great Appalachian novel,” and she did. Her other novels and nonfiction, including The Poisonwood Bible, Animal Dreams, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life are wonderful, important books. What many people don’t know is that Barbara Kingsolver is also an incredible poet. Check out How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons), 2020, a collection that brings the natural world right into your senses so powerfully that you feel like you are in her place, on her homestead, right there with two feet on the ground, seeing, smelling and tasting what’s around you. Intimate language that transcends the poet’s private experience is a rare thing indeed. In those poems, you can feel the generosity of being welcomed onto someone else’s land.

Kingsolver’s land is Appalachia and it saturates Demon Copperhead’s sprawling episodic plot, its tragic scenes and its powerfully charming and honest narration by a young boy caught in a culture destroyed by opioids. In her recent interview with Ezra Klein, Kingsolver describes how the opioid epidemic “has become a huge assault on our culture, our families, our communities. It’s devastated so many of the good things about this region that we value and that we love.” She was drawn to “these kids who’ve been damaged and this place that’s been damaged.”

Appalachia, in this novel, is like America’s orphan that has “suffered the exploitation of extractive industries, managed by and profited from outside companies that come in and take what they can and leave a mess.” Kingsolver says, “it started out with the timber industry. Then it was coal. Then it was tobacco. And now, the latest car in this coal train of exploitations has been the opioid epidemic, which was, again, quite deliberately perpetrated on us as a vulnerable population.” While timber, coal, and tobacco ravaged the land, opioids left a whole generation of children orphaned by parents who are either dead, addicted, or incarcerated. 

Resting in the structural sockets of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, Demon Copperhead, too, is an orphan story writ large. In this case, our narrator, Demon, is a child who loses both parents and navigates rural Tennessee on his own, moving from forced labor on a farm, to sleeping on a soggy floor by a washing machine, to huddling behind dumpsters. He’s ignored by the foster care system and struggling through life in an opioid-riddled community, just as Dickens’ David Copperfield makes his way through a devastated 19th century industrial England. 

Demon’s voice is Kingsolver’s “attempt to speak to people” and “to be a mirror for {her} people to feel seen.” In the process of writing, she said it’s “been an amazing experience, to hear from kids in the foster care system, from teachers, from so many people in Demon’s walk of life saying, I never knew that anybody else could see how hard this is — but at the same time, to let people from elsewhere understand the complexity of our lives here, the nuance of Appalachian culture, the value of our communities, the whole ecosystems of characters that we are — the bad and the good — and the ways that we take care of ourselves. I wanted this book to be a conversation about that divide.” 

That divide interests us at Pulley Press. Poetry is one way to have a conversation. By working with poets who live in overlooked communities with great stories to tell, we commission documentary poetry manuscripts, and we publish them. To us, documentary poetry is a form of oral history set into an artistic collage of voices. People show up to tell their stories and Pulley poets work to create poems that animate these perspectives. Poems are a way for people to be seen and for language to enhance the reader’s ability to see them.

When people ask Kingsolver “how she could live in the middle of nowhere?” She answers, “People, this is my everywhere. This is my everything. I live on a farm that grows food where water comes out of the mountain among trees that make oxygen. City folks are depending on us for a lot of things that they routinely discount or make fun of.”

Bravo, fellow poet Barbara Kingsolver. Thank you.