The Bean Can: A Book - by Steven R. Cope
Publication Date: October 1, 2018
Paperback, 192 pages
ISBN: 978-1-937968-48-9
Available from Small Press Distribution
When Agile Hess goes missing, his mother asks his one-time friend Hills to find him. This search leads Hills back through memories of a boyhood spent shooting at bean cans with Agile, until interrupted by tragedy. Part picaresque crime caper, part unlikely Grail quest, this book is foremost an evocation of the author's deep love for the people, the animals, and the land of his native Appalachia.
Praise for The Bean Can
Emotionally raw and true to the bone, this novel won’t leave you where it found you. The world of best friends Agile and Hills is tragic, comic, shocking, and familiar all at once. Their story and their families’ history is not set in a place, but woven of that place. Cope knows the lay of the land, the community of creatures, fields and woods, as well as he knows his characters, some bewildered, some corrupt, others hanging on the best they can at the end of an unpaved road. Cope has an affinity with Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, but his genius is all his
own. Don’t miss this book!
George Ella Lyon, former Kentucky Poet Laureate
When Steven R. Cope’s first book of poems, In Killdeer’s Field, was published in 2002, the back cover blurber noted that he had never lost "his almost obsessive attachment to the hills of eastern Kentucky, where he was born." Despite the passage of many years and the appearance of many more books since that remark, his obsession remains undiminished. Born in Menifee County, Kentucky on July 3, 1949, Cope’s heart is still, and will no doubt ever remain, in those hills. The undergirding and the heartbeat and muscle of his creative impulse derive not from the city, not from the archives of literature, but from a close and fundamental connection with the land and its creatures. However, his thought and his vision extend far beyond any regional boundaries, and his literary antecedents include such writers as Camus, Hesse, Tolstoy and London.
Although he has devoted half his life to music as a songwriter and performer and teacher, having taught guitar to hundreds of students, and although he has published over 100 works of short fiction, Cope has always considered himself first and foremost a poet. He has taught creative writing at the University of Kentucky, Morehead State University and Eastern Kentucky University. He lives in Winchester, Kentucky.