Coal River Road exposes the powerful role that a rapidly fading oral history can have on one s perception of cultural identity. The poet s connection to the West Virginia mountains is as ephemeral as her connection to hearth and family, simultaneously formative and destructive, yet impossible to resist. These poems are about heritage learned and loved and lost, the quest to retrieve one s self in the ordinary domestic day, and the ferocity of familial relationships that can never quite be fulfilled.