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Out June 2, 2026 - University of Kentucky Press

Description

Let the Forest Go is a memoir in poetic fragments that follows a queer Appalachian's quest for truth as he explores memory, intergenerational trauma, and the rise of authoritarian power. During the turbulent 2016 US presidential election, Justin Wymer experienced a sense of dislocation while teaching English in Spain—where the landscape resembles his home region, but cultures differ deeply. Through letters, poems, and vignettes, this intensely personal and formally inventive work captures his impressions, blending lyric prose and verse to offer a unique examination of belonging.

In this liminal space, time, and environment, Wymer dissects his multifaceted identity as an expat, a gay man raised in a religious, small West Virginia town, a member of a family involved in the opioid epidemic, a mourner caught within Appalachia's poorly understood grieving rites, and a human witness to ecological devastation. By searching for beauty amid past and present destruction, Let the Forest Go attempts to embody queerness through fluctuating form and interrogates whether memory, being unavoidably fictional, is a viable source of inspiration.

Advance Praise

In three balanced sections, Let the Forest Go presents a fractured memoir of queerness, otherness, travel, addiction, and belonging. Set between Galicia, Spain and the Coal River in West Virginia, Wymer's unsentimental journey toward self-acceptance offers a distinct perspective. A compelling read for fans of contemporary poetry and experimental forms.

~Doug Van Gundy, coeditor of Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods: Fiction and Poetry from West Virginia

A powerful collection of poems circling the beauty and tragedy of loving impossible places and difficult people. Like light glowing from a wound, it pulses with emotion and refuses to let go. Wymer's words shake me, hold my gaze, and leave an impression I'll carry for a long, long time.

~Mesha Maren, author of Shae

In these diary-like poems, the stunningly talented Justin Wymer spelunks a series of personal and political caves, emerging with treasure but always going back in for more, spellbound by the necessary, difficult work of negotiating self and other, present and past, hope and despair. "The soul's a vagrant stuck in place," Wymer wryly notes—but this writing has found gorgeous release.

~Donna Stonecipher, author of The Ruins of Nostalgia

Each sentence and line of Let the Forest Go carries the propulsive, combustible energy of having been written out of necessity. Reckoning with memory and desire requires Wymer to write a self in the process of undoing itself; exile frees him to admit the extent of his fragmentation. And yet I leave the last page of this remarkable document certain: it's not possible to let the forest go entirely. Not when the mountains and waters of West Virginia are, like family, the fundament of identity and the font of wonder, love – and terror. What bravery to say a wound so beautifully.

~Brian Teare, author of Poem Bitten by a Man