Description
Praise for Unrationed Hope
In the direst of times, home is the anchor that grounds and saves us. Judith Duvall’s debut collection, Unrationed Hope, offers a home front during World War II in intimate detail, a rural home front not often pictured in iconic WWII images. And within this East Tennessee community is the young witness of sacrifice and dread, Duvall herself, her hair loose without the pins collected for the “war machine,” her dreams of battlefields and sure victory. Despite this upended world of uncles and brothers taken or missing on foreign soil, her poems of remembrance for those “dear boys” and vigilant families plant their feet and being in the daily pieced rituals that get us through—for war is ever with us, and we are endlessly waiting for word, any word, of safe return. Read this poignant work equally for then as for now.
—Linda Parsons Marion, author of Mother Land and This Shaky Earth
Vivid and accessible, these poems take you behind the lines of war’s home front: empty places at tables and beds, letters home, terrible telegrams, brave fronts, and joyous reunions. They tell eternal stories set in the acutely drawn small town and farm families that endured World War II.
—Pamela Schoenewaldt, author of When We Were Strangers
Duvall’s target is the rarest history of World War II: the sobs and smiles of the home front. Here is the secret history too important for a textbook. She does not miss her mark—do not miss her words.
—Joseph Savage, Major, USAFR
