Snakeberry Mamas: Words from the Wild
Poetry chapbook by Mary Alice Dixon, published September 2025 by Charlotte Lit Press
In Snakeberry Mamas Mary Alice Dixon’s words from the wild conjure an Appalachian landscape of lust, where sex, song, and witchy women charm the reader with chant. From the crossroads of Witcher Way Holler to the waters of Hungry River, these poems carry you into a magic world of owl-women, dandelion girls, and the memories of dead mothers alive in the heartwood of trees. In these liminal places grief makes knife blades of red pickled eggs; a goddess offers salvation in tongue of fire; a hellfire-and-brimstone suffragette shares a recipe for britches with balls. Recipient of the NC Writers’ Network Randall Jarrell Award in Poetry, a NC Poetry Society Poet Laureate Award finalist, multiple Pushcart nominee, and past professor of architectural and landscape history, Mary Alice Dixon makes poetry that muses mountains and maps gardens you will never want to leave.
Praise for Snakeberry Mamas
In Snakeberry Mamas, Mary Alice Dixon casts a luminous eye on the hardscrabble sacred—braiding grief, grit, and grandmotherly magic into song. These are poems of invocation and inheritance, rooted in the red clay and mythos of mountain women who birth themselves from “bloodroot” and "fire.” Dixon writes with fierce tenderness and hard-earned clarity, inviting us into a world where “owl women brush you with wishbones” and “the moon bleeds” our names. This is Appalachian lyricism at its most incantatory, subversive, and deeply alive.
— AE Hines, author of Adam in the Garden and Any Dumb Animal
A wild, witty, and sometimes wicked witchery informs the poems of Mary Alice Dixon’sSnakeberry Mamas. Herein, unforgettable Appalachian landscapes are voiced by characters--familial, historical, and mythical--who evoke a vision of transformative potions and folkloric wisdom. Snakeberry Mamas celebrates the strength of women as healers and magicians with poems that cast their welcome spell on the reader.
— Stuart Dischell, author of Good Hope Road and The Lookout Man