Heartland Review Finalist, Eric Hoffer Award Nominee!
 
"Katerina Canyon's poems offer intimate accounts of home as the locus of danger--and homeland as a state of oppression. They are at once urgent and mysterious, full of ocean depths and surging currents." -- Devin Johnston, author of Mosses and Lichens
 
"In lush language and startling images, Katerina unveils a story in blood and bone of a speaker who survives domestic cycles of addiction and abuse, terrors handed down from the plantation through generations of her kin..." -- Katy Didden, author of The Glacier's Wake
 
Katerina Canyon's poems dive into history unafraid to explore the complexity of home and family and acknowledge: the sea is filled with bones. -- Kelli Russell Agodon, author of Dialogues with Rising Tides.
 
Surviving Home - Concisely arresting and challenging the beliefs of family and the fantasies of tradition, the poems in Surviving Home show that home is a place that you survive rather than a place where you are nurtured. With unyielding cadence and unparalleled sadness and warmth, I contemplate the prejudice and limitations buried in a person's Black heritage: parents that seem to care for you with one hand and slap you with the other, the secret desires to be released from the daily burdens of life, as well as the surprising ways a child chooses to amuse herself. Finding resilience in the unexpected, this collection tears down the delicate facades of family.