“To graduate from the New Opportunity School for Women is to graduate from the commons that is this hard-knock life into a new and revolutionary awareness, an awakening that can lead the individual to be born again to herself, her people, and her land—truly, to potential itself. Well, Sandi Keaton-Wilson must have been the valedictorian. In No Shroud of Silence, Keaton-Wilson unleashes not only her own story but also the stories of countless other Appalachian women into a psalm of hope that teaches us to hold hands across the centuries and embolden each other to sing out, to never again be stopped, so that our daughters and granddaughters will always know how loved and how lovely they are.”
—REBECCA GAYLE HOWELL, author of American Purgatory and Render/An Apocalypse, James Still Writer-in-Residence at Hindman Settlement School, and Poetry Editor, Oxford American
“The word powerful best describes Sandi Keaton-Wilson’s No Shroud of Silence. Her poems give voice to emotions most of us hold but cannot express. And the characters within her short stories sometimes are heroic, sometimes tragic. But all are colorfully and honestly portrayed. Her opening three-page comparison of Appalachia to a tall, raw-boned woman of indefinite years is worth the price of the book alone.”
—SANDRA P. ALDRICH, international Christian speaker and author of two dozen books, including the award-winning Zetta’s Dream: An Appalachian Coal Camp Novel
“Sandi Keaton-Wilson has something to say. She, like her southeast Kentucky homeland, is a woe-struck and a strong-willed survivor. No Shroud of Silence demonstrates the rich variety of what it means to be an Appalachian writer. In the poetry (both free verse and formal) and the prose (fiction and nonfiction) of this book she faces square-on the sorrows of a life redeemed by conversations with her Kentucky ancestors and stories of loss and perseverance that are personal as well as part of the fabric of the region and of all human experience. With closely observed details of tobacco farming, coal mining, walks through sunlit forests, and family interactions, Keaton-Wilson serves up elegies, humor, horrors of spousal abuse, and accounts of succumbing to and then standing up to prejudice. She is even able to find understanding for the hard-hearted men who, because of the emasculating effects of unemployment and poverty, see the compassion in / her eyes as mockery. There is much healing going on here for reader and writer in poems and stories that study old wounds, / then bandage them with those healing words. Read this book that teaches Fireflies, like hell’s sparks, / remind us of the dangers of darkness. / ‘Come to the light, oh loved ones, before it’s too late.’”
—ROB MERRITT, author of The Language of Longing, professor of English and director, Honors Program, Bluefield College
