BOOK REVIEW

Ian Hall’s Creekwater Mansions

By Allison Pitinii Davis     July 24, 2026




Creekwater Mansions
Ian Hall
EastOver Press (2026)
140 pp. $19.99 (paperback)

Ian Hall’s Creekwater Mansions knows all about the exploitive gaze on Appalachia. In result, the contract it makes with the reader is steep: you’re not allowed to gawk at the region from a safe distance; you need to come closer and closer until you’re “six rugged feet/up a bull’s ass.” This is a book that takes us as deep into outhouses as it does political language wars over Appalachian terms like “hillbilly” and “redneck.” Hall’s poetry restores “redneck” to its socialist origins, a move of national importance in an age where Hillbilly Elegy—a sob story the powerful coastal market fell for and elevated—has done its damage and then some. In “The Redneckery,” Hall moves seamlessly from Lacan to the Battle of Blair Mountain, where rednecked hillbillies “flex their solidarity with Red Labor/worldwide” and pass this class consciousness to their children:

Owning free & clear the earth
you scourge is a hillbilly’s objet petit a.
I’ve whittled most my life away
in libraries, & even I know that
the red on our necks comes from those kerchiefs
at Blair Mountain….
& in the 70s, during the mine
wars, Harlan County kindergarteners gave up
pledging allegiance to the flag. Instead, they blared
“Which Side Are You On?” over the intercom system
at morning assembly & addressed their Christmas
wishlists to the union local. They trusted the UMWA
a hell of a sight more
than old Saint Nick & his team
of scab reindeer.

This question of trust runs to the core of this collection. A region known for its extraction economy, Appalachia is also a region that often gets the short shrift in the literary world. Hailing from southeastern Kentucky, Hall understands exactly what kind of poetry market he’s getting into—one where a common critique of “regional” poetry is that the folksiness can veer sentimental, where insiders question your accuracy; outsiders, your relevancy. One where if you sell your family out just right, this country might make you vice president. Appalachia is one of the hardest regions in America to get right, which is why Creekwater Mansions is not only working, but working overtime. This collection joins Joy Priest’s Horsepower, Essy Stone’s What it Done to Us, and Ryan Walsh’s Reckonings as debut Appalachian poetry collections that challenge the nation to look harder at the region.

Hall wisely addresses the sentimentality question directly: “Sentimentality: when you give/more tenderness to a thing/than its creator.” Indeed, Hall does not romanticize the region; his is a collection where a speaker complicates regional stereotypes, admitting he’d “rather pore over/Sanskrit in a cloistered abbey than blast/Tannerite on some bumfuck mountain top.” But the speaker also clarifies that this drive for self-knowledge is an inside job; he grew up watching a grandfather—a miner—use his limited downtime to care for and show horses: “in squinting awe I’d watch him, this man/who untangled his own hernia/with a box-cutter, become elegant.” Like the grandfather, each horse, too, went through a transformation from worker to aesthete, from an “old plowhorse” the grandfather had “swapped a motorized garden tiller for—one whose blood was about as blue/as a foreclosure sign.”

In the poem, the speaker revels at the grandfather training his horses, “That he could take something haggard, homely//stock and learn to make it move so neat of hoof, to gait & rein/sphinxlike over any pattern.” This is also exactly what Hall does with his poetics—he takes the speech and idiom of a region and teaches it to pattern. For example, in “Hormonal,” the speaker uses drop lines to enact a tongue working itself around working-class sexuality:

Tonight’s pathos piece: 16
          year old ties state’s largest cherry stem
                    with her tongue. The judges keep applauding

the integrity
          of her knot, its lithe classicism. Something blue
                    collar & sensuous.

Like the gait of the horses and the teenager’s cherry knot, Hall’s lines gain their integrity by insisting on this combination of classicism and class warfare. And he does this nuanced work in a distinctly Appalachian vernacular, “wringing the hell/out of the holy alphabet.” This melding of class and form is further explored in the poem “Pastoral vs. Georgic.” While both ancient forms traditionally focus on rural life, poems in the georgic tradition also depict labor. This poem—and book—argue that it is impossible to gaze on Appalachia’s natural beauty without acknowledging the difficult work that its people do daily to survive living in a place America treats like an internal colony. As Diogenes’s epigraph puts it before section two: “In a rich man’s house, there is no place to spit but in his face.”

The book also does the important work of situating Appalachia in an international context. While there is a domestic acknowledgement that “Some places, the lawns are kept kempt. Year round/they’re neat as pool table velvet…/But I don’t think you can get there//from here, where I’m loafing on the porch/of a house chewed/to osteoporosis by termites,” there is also the acknowledgement of how many places have it even worse. It is the practical mother of the collection who puts class in a global context; when the speaker complains of their lifestyle, of “our sole toilet that didn’t flush right” or “the dryer/that ran hot enough to cauter a slit-wrist,” the mother pushes back:

she’d tell me in plain
scald that three quarters of the world would war
over a finicky toilet, an awry dryer. That I was sitting

pretty.

This is the same mother who, when she catches a man stealing the wiring out of her childhood home, she gave him “half/a paycheck” and “together they wept & he rewired/all that copper himself.”

While Creekwater Mansions’s triumphs are many, it is voice that reigns—both with its virtuosic drive across the lines and its rhetoric. The speakers’ drawls mark them as “locals” whose humor eviscerates their region not with condescension but intimacy: “I treated myself to a cherry snowcone at the First/Baptist church fundraiser. It heartened/me to learn they call that flavor God’s // Hemoglobin”; the working-class romance of “I’ll help you savor this final day/of free-trial satellite”; the topographical triumph of “West Kentucky—shit—it’s so flat/you can watch your dog run away for a week”; and the “lo-fi sublime” of that “coal-eyed so-and-so.” In this age where nationalism threatens to homogenize regional distinction—and where the algorithm flattens American art--Creekwater Mansions offers a vital, contemporary poetics of resistance.

​Creekwater Mansions by Ian Hall

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ALLISON PITINII DAVIS is the author of Another Architecture, selected for the Dorset Prize (Tupelo Press, 2028); Business in Agency 3: Novellas (Baobab Press, 2025); and Line Study of a Motel Clerk (Baobab, 2017). A 2025 NEA recipient, she is a visiting assistant professor of poetry at Ohio State University.