Wearing Heels in the Rust Belt

the long version

Winner of the 2011 Main Street Rag Chapbook Contest. "The poems in Wearing Heels in the Rust Belt overflow with vivid, gritty imagery. Weyant's intelligent voice conjures scenes of hard-working characters struggling to not just survive, but thrive in their challenging circumstances. This chapbook captures an essential, flamboyant defiance against the landscape, women painting their nails bright colors even as their night-shifts in factories cover them with cuts, bruises, and grime. Karen J. Weyant is an important new talent and I eagerly anticipate reading more of her wonderful work!" —Jeannine Hall Gailey author of *She Returns to the Floating World* "Gathered here are poems of place, a place where everything tastes, faintly, of rust. The speakers are girls and women used to moving through the fields, junkyards, and factories of the rust belt, through towns 'made of churches / and bars.' They speak for those often overlooked girls who come of age by learning 'to balance in heels, in mud / or dust or rubble.' Here are poems both accurate in description and true in spirit." —Sandy Longhorn, author of *Blood Almanac* "The women and girls that populate Karen J. Weyant's new collection are enigmatic: sharpened by too-early experience, yet with a keen eye and ear for the beauty to be found in their dangerous landscape. Whether it is the blood red of a harvest moon or the rust flaking off an old pick-up truck, the crinkle of an emptied beer can or a jar of trapped bees, Weyant, like her women, conjures a new Rust Belt, broken down to its gritty, elemental base and hauntingly gorgeous." —Katie Cappello, author of *Perpetual Care*