The cold and the rust

About this book

Winner of the 2016 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry, a tender portrait of a queer girlhood on Michigan's Upper Peninsula. In this lyrical and unflinching debut, a landscape of staggering beauty abuts industrial towns in the throes of economic decay. Emily Van Kley explores notions of home, estrangement, isolation, and longing against a backdrop of crystalline winters, Lake Superior's mythic tempers, and forests as vast as they are close.