April L. Ford’s third chapbook is set in a fictionalized Appalachian town where social hierarchies, gossip, and isolation shape everyday life. Through scenes drawn from dive bars, apartments, yoga studios, and mountain streets, the poems explore what it means to arrive somewhere new and discover how quickly a community can decide who belongs and who does not.

Some poems examine the rituals of small-town social life — the way reputations form, rumors spread, and outsiders are measured against invisible local rules. Others turn toward darker subjects, including bullying, misogyny, loneliness, and the quiet despair that can take root in isolated places. A “roll call” poem lists the names of young people whose lives ended after public harassment, placing personal experience within a wider cultural landscape of violence and loss.

Throughout the chapbook, humor and satire coexist with grief and anger. Everyday encounters — a morning walk past a man shouting from his apartment window, a conversation at a dive bar, the repainting of an apartment — become moments that reveal how power, vulnerability, and survival operate in small communities.

Taken together, the poems consider how people navigate belonging and exile, and how memory reshapes the places we once called home.