In The Pink House / Rising Up Singing, memory becomes both landscape and language. This collection of 34 narrative poems traces a childhood and adolescence spent on a remote barrier island along North Carolina's Outer Banks during the 1950s-a time when the coast remained largely untouched, a "virgin strip of sand" shaped more by tide and storm than by development. At the center stands the pink house, a place of shelter and fracture, where generations overlap: a grandmother's grounding presence, a mother's quiet endurance, and the tension of a fragile marriage that hums beneath daily life. Around it, the natural world presses close-sand shifting underfoot, dunes breathing, the Atlantic in constant motion, and hurricanes arriving with both violence and strange clarity. These poems move in a connected arc, building a portrait of place that is inseparable from the emotional terrain of growing up. The speaker's voice is distinctly southern-lyrical, reflective, and at times spiritual-attuned to the rhythms of land and family alike. Weather becomes metaphor, the earth a kind of witness, and memory a way of reclaiming what time has altered or erased. More than nostalgia, this collection is an act of preservation. It offers readers-especially those familiar with the Outer Banks-a return to what once was, while inviting all readers to inhabit a world where childhood, nature, and the sacred are deeply intertwined.
