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The River on Our Hands

by AJ Wright

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AJ Wright’s The River on our Hands is as much a historical account as it is a poetry collection. The book explores growing up in a small West Virginia town on the banks of the Ohio River: our poet faces encroaching floodwater on a trip to the store, constructs a makeshift airplane from leftover wood and rusted metal, and watches the river through the windows of old cars. The backdrop is the aftermath of tragedy, calcifying into the town’s story: the collapse of the Pleasants Power Station cooling tower that killed fifty-one workers. It was the deadliest construction disaster America had known. In The River on our Hands, AJ Wright asks what silence carries through personal and collective memory, and how the tragedy echoes through the land and people who continue to live in the region.

AJ Wright is a poet born in the Ohio River Valley region of West Virginia. She spent her early childhood in a house that stood in the shadow of the Pleasants Power Station at Willow Island. Her work explores the intersections of landscape, labor, and memory in Appalachian communities shaped by industry and environmental change. She is the founding editor of Pictura Journal, and her poems have appeared in Thimble Literary Magazine, Antiphony Journal, wildscape. literary journal, River and South Review, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Bowling Green State University and was awarded an Oak Ledge Residency at Hindman Settlement School in 2025. She currently lives five miles downriver from her hometown. The River on Our Hands is her first book.