Pretty Mother's Home: A Shakeress Daybook - Poetry by Vickie Cimprich
Published September 2007
Paperback, 80 pages
ISBN: 978-0-972114-48-6
Through the words of the imaginary (but very authentic) Sister Jessie, the lives of the Shakers of the Pleasant Hill community in 19th century Kentucky are revealed in rich detail, humorous and poignant, spiritual and oh so human. Based on extensive historical research and chronicling the real people and events that shaped this community, this book is especially noteworthy for its focus on the largely undocumented lives of black Shakers. But most of all, it is great narrative poetry, the perfect medium for these voices to speak across the years to modern listeners.
Praise for Vickie Cimprich and Pretty Mother's Home
“With Pretty Mother’s Home: A Shakeress Daybook, Cimprich contributes to the poetry of Kentucky places. Much imaginative writing about Shakers tells us more about its writers than about Shakers; Cimprich in her use of historical resources at Pleasant Hill has amplified voices of the Believers themselves. I am long familiar with the names and events in her poems. For me now they have life.”
Larrie Curry, Vice President and Curator, Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill
“Vickie Cimprich’s poems about the Shakers of Kentucky speak in the voices of this unique community with wit, concision, and a thrilling attentiveness to the details that bring them to life. This is the way, with ease and grace, history becomes contemporary. Pretty Mother’s Home is irresistible.”
Rosellen Brown, author of Cora Fry
Northern Kentuckian Vickie Cimprich writes of many good and interesting times in the Eastern Kentucky mountains.
Her poetry collection Pretty Mother’s Home: A Shakeress Daybook was researched at the Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill, KY with support from the Kentucky Foundation for Women. The Foundation’s mission is to support feminist artists engaged in social change. With the Shaker poems, as well as her article “Free and Freed Believers and Affiliates of African Descent at Pleasant Hill, Kentucky,” in The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society (Autumn 2013), she shares enlivening awareness of the Shakers' egalitarian convictions and practices.
Other KFW grants assisted in her participation in the 1999 Spoleto Symposium per Scrittori, as well as visits to French Cistercian abbeys where a 12th century tradition of land-holding and stewardship practices continues.
Her work has appeared in A Quilted Life, with Hazel Durbin (Contrary Bear Track Press, 2002), The African American Review, Bigger Than They Appear: Anthology of Very Short Poems (Accents Press, 2011), Dappled Things, Inscape, The Journal of the Association of Franciscan Colleges and Universities, The Journal of Kentucky Studies, The Licking River Review, Mediphors, The Merton Journal, The Mom Egg, Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, Plainsongs, Poetry As Prayer: Appalachian Women Speak (Wind Publications, 2004), Seminary Ridge Review, The Single
Hound, Still - the Journal, and Waypoints. She has taught English at Lees College, Northern Kentucky University, and the University of Cincinnati.