West Virginia Poet Laureate Marc Harshman calls Belleville native Randi Ward “a fresh, disturbing new voice” in his praise of her most recent poetry collection, Whipstitches.

Published by North Carolina-based MadHat Press, Whipstitches contains 99 compact poems that stitch together the haunting story of a family and farm in crisis, Ward said.

“Underlying the whole,” author and editor Lee Sharkey writes of Whipstitches, “is both abiding love for the homeplace and knowledge of the wounds it inflicts.”

Ward also points out that the various meanings of the word “whipstitch” are key to understanding other important aspects of the collection.

“Aside from being a stitch for sewing two pieces of material together, a whipstitch can be a moment in time or used as a suturing technique,” Ward said.

“So much of this book hinges on the connections and relationships that influence the ways we learn to associate, and think about or experience, things. These poems demonstrate how a moment in time, an experience, can become the wound and the stitch — again and again and again. We are all born into — and constantly shape and take shape within — fields of language, culture and history,” Ward said.

The cover of Whipstitches, which features original artwork, graphite rubbings of bailing twine, and handmade lettering by local artist Chris Sturm, depicts a vivid field filled with baled rolls of hay. A closer look reveals that words and textures are bristling through the landscape, and the foreground imagery is unraveling into gray threads, Ward said.

“For me, Whipstitches is about how people, words, images, memory and other things become bound up in one another — even as they are simultaneously becoming something else. I’ve often thought of hay rolls as an interesting metaphor for all of this, and I’m fascinated by the system of relationships, the ecosystem, that haying represents,” Ward said.

“You can tell a lot about a farm by looking at the condition of its fields.”

Randi Ward and Chris Sturm collaborated with graphic designer Kendall Markley to bring the concept behind Whipstitches to life. Altogether, the collection’s design took six months to complete and involved extensive experimentation with a number of methods and media, said Ward, a 2000 graduate of Parkersburg South High School.

Ward and her team gathered all sorts of materials from around the area where she grew up in order to literally work some piece of Belleville into the design, she said.

“The landscape-orientation of the book was a must for me. I also wanted to integrate graphic elements into the pages to create a visual undercurrent that could reinforce the narrative flow of the poems as well as suggest the larger context they’re a part of. We needed something subtle yet dynamic that could serve as the ‘gray matter’ of the collection. We finally got some hay string from my wonderful neighbors on Pond Creek, Bill and Betty Smith, and it did the trick,” Ward said.

Since its release this summer, Whipstitches has garnered praise and already become a part of the creative writing curricula in a number of high schools and universities across the state, according to a press release.

Ward’s poetry was also recently selected for inclusion in West Virginia University Press’ Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods, a new anthology of contemporary poetry and fiction from West Virginia, and her photography is on display as part of the Appalachian Heritage Photography Exhibit at Shepherd University.

“I’m really grateful for the community of artists that I’ve become a part of since I moved back to West Virginia. I count many of these people among my dearest friends, and I can never thank them enough for their kindness and support,” she said.

Ward, who currently resides in Parkersburg, chose to dedicate Whipstitches to the memory of her grandparents, Jack and Clara Beach. “My grandparents were exceptional people. Not an hour goes by that I don’t think of them.”

This article by Paul LaPann originally appeared in The Parkersburg News and Sentinel.