In We Were Once Here, Michael McFee continues to write inventive appreciations of often-overlooked subjects, particularly the people and language of his native Appalachia. This new collection contains thoughtful and playful celebrations of such things as snoring, a wall telephone from the 1960s, yardsticks, the Sunday newspaper, and Fats Waller. It also extends the poet’s characteristic lyric keenness into longer work, including a twenty-one-part centerpiece elegy for his niece. The book concludes with, and is framed by, poems that explore the bittersweet enduring joys of “here.”

MICHAEL MCFEE, a native of Asheville, North Carolina, has taught poetry writing at UNC-Chapel Hill since 1990. He is the author or editor of fifteen books: of his nine poetry collections, the previous four—That Was Oasis, Shinemaster, Earthly, and Colander, were published by Carnegie Mellon.