I Don’t Go Down That Road Anymore is an open-access book published by the University of North Alabama’s Lion Bridge Publishing in Florence, Alabama.
You can find I Don’t Go Down That Road Anymore here. The book is free to read.
“Rachel Nix writes from the steep inclines of inheritance and memory, where past is a lived terrain. I Don’t Go Down That Road Anymore is a poetry collection tracing intimate geographies of family, place, and womanhood. Here, mothers braise like moon and sun, names are tried on and shed, inherited traits prescribe bodily identity as well as metaphysical, and these bodies also learn to be reclaimed. This collection challenges the meaning of leaving as a transformation rather than an escape, and even forgiveness treads suspiciously with its weight being measured, not freely given.
Nix presents the reader with a negotiation with what remains. Each poem is like turning away, inward, and forward–or all three in one.”
There is always something to learn from a Southern voice, flavored as it is with nuance, wistfulness, and pain. The colloquial turns of phrase and easy pace of these poems belie their formal structure. Often walking in stately couplets or sculpted into powerful quatrains, Nix’s poems lead to seeing and understanding. She can also nudge toward blurring what is often necessary to accept certain harsh realities. But here’s the thing – once her voice is in your ear, dear reader, you will keep listening for it. Her unabashed truth-telling resonates for a long time.
-Jeanie Thompson, author of The Myth of Water: Poems from the Life of Helen Keller
Reading Rachel Nix’s work is like talking with a good friend about what you keep secret and what you can’t hide, what shakes you awake at night and what gets you out of bed in the morning. In these poems, Nix walks the reader to the heart of what it means to live honestly, to love fully, and to stand strong against hate. This book is a road I want to travel again and again.
-Emma Bolden, author of The Tiger and the Cage
Poet Nathaniel Mackey once described how, for the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea, poetic language arises “from a breach in human solidarity, a violation of kinship,” and that is exactly what drives Rachel Nix’s I Don’t Go Down That Road Anymore. She writes, “it is not easy, / forgiving the living,” and the mere attempt to do so is remarkable, given the depth of neglect, control, and aggression–passive or otherwise–that trouble the roots of this collection. But Nix has learned her mother’s “hellcat ways,” and is the kind of poet who can “burn anything down to its truth.” There is extraordinary honor in her fires.
-Andy Fogle, author of Mother Countries and poetry editor of Salvation South
Rachel Nix 