Eureka Mill: 20th Anniversary Edition

First published in 1998, Eureka Mill is Ron Rash’s seminal collection of poetry, which introduced the world to an often overlooked Appalachian region and cemented Rash’s name as synonymous with Southern writing.

Eureka Mill presents a lyrical portrait of the migration of poor North Carolina farmers to Chester, South Carolina to work in the Eureka Cotton Mill in the years before the Great Depression. Drawing on his family history in the region that stretches back three hundred years, Rash assembles a nuanced tapestry of mill village life, from the foremen in their offices to the men and women at the looms toiling in the often inhumane conditions of the mills.

Rash’s poetry elevates the people and landscapes of rural Appalachia to incandescent heights, garnering comparisons to the work of Seamus Heaney and Robert Frost. Still one of Rash’s finest works to date, Eureka Mill is a vital record of one of the South’s most important historic shifts, offering readers at once intimacy and perspective, heart and understanding.

With a foreword by New York Times Bestselling author Robert Morgan and new note by the author, this twentieth anniversary edition will ensure Eureka Mill will be treasured by a new generation of readers and scholars alike.

Praise for Eureka Mill

“As exhibited in Eureka Mill, his finely honed craftsmanship is most salient in his poetry, which has a casual, addictive appeal.” —Publishers Weekly

"Most of Eureka Mill is composed in a kind of homestitched tetrameter, regular as the warp and weft of Oxford cloth and just as seamless.” —GC Waldrep

"Every now and then a book comes along that transports us so thoroughly to another time and another way of life that, when we finally put it down, our own lives don't quite look the same. It is even more remarkable if the book is set where we live, a place we thought we'd been." —The Asheville Citizen-Times

Cover Image: Mark Robinson