Middlesboro native Larry D. Thacker has a newly-published book.

Finishing Line Press in Georgetown has published his book, “Drifting in Awe.”

Already the author of “Mountain Mysteries: The Mystic Traditions of Appalachia” and the two poetry chapter books “Voice Hunting” and “Memory Train,” this is Thacker’s first full collection of poetry.

“Drifting in Awe” is a poetic wrestling with both the clear realities and the confounding mysteries making up who we are in this drifting world we occupy — a place deserving awe and interpretation, a release from the publisher states.

“If I’d been charged with assembling the information placed on the gold record accompanying the Voyager Space Probe, I would have etched on that message something like what “Drifting in Awe” became as a project,” Thacker said. “There’s poetry to be found in the most complicated and the simplest of questions around us every day. That’s what drives my writing.”

“The poems in this resonant book offer a strong, hands-on encounter with the world as it is, with the weather, geography, the trees, our fellow creatures. Attending to the muscular and physical realities of the local world, however, rightly leads these poems to the lesser-known and less-certain wonders of the metaphysical, to the apprehension, as far as the mind can reach […]” offers Maurice Manning, author of The Common Man (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry).

Jane Hicks, author of “Driving With the Dead,” offers that Thacker writes “of the natural world and what hovers on the edge of consciousness […] Thacker invites us to be still and let that world come to us if we are brave enough.”

Copies are available from Finishing Line Press at: https://www.finishinglinepress.com or from Amazon.com. Keep up with the author at www.larrydthacker.com and on Instagram at: thackalachia.