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Tore All to Pieces
Not yet published
Expected 17 Mar 26Nestled in the mountains, in an out-of-the-way part of rural America, the fictional town of Mosely is home to ordinary proud, compassionate, and complex. Women serving biscuits at the gas station counter, nieces listening to Loretta Lynn with their uncles, teenage boys flirting with one another at prom, and parents busy raising their children's babies. This small community is woven together by family ties, church congregations, coal mines, and fast-food chains. Amidst these hills, the residents work hard to find belonging, love, and identity.
Tore All to Pieces is a fragmented novel that delves into the lives of Appalachian characters whose struggles, backgrounds, and experiences intersect, and examines how interconnected yet lonely people can be. The different narratives, presented in the form of poems and stories, bend and weave like the roads of Appalachia. Each character's voice is richly portrayed through gripping and lyrical language, uniting in a quest for truth, genuine understanding, acknowledgement, and respect.
In a time when the rights of queer individuals, women, and people of color are increasingly under threat, this work powerfully re-affirms the humanity and significance of marginalized people. Tore All to Pieces underscores their enduring presence and rightful belonging.
Tore All to Pieces is a fragmented novel that delves into the lives of Appalachian characters whose struggles, backgrounds, and experiences intersect, and examines how interconnected yet lonely people can be. The different narratives, presented in the form of poems and stories, bend and weave like the roads of Appalachia. Each character's voice is richly portrayed through gripping and lyrical language, uniting in a quest for truth, genuine understanding, acknowledgement, and respect.
In a time when the rights of queer individuals, women, and people of color are increasingly under threat, this work powerfully re-affirms the humanity and significance of marginalized people. Tore All to Pieces underscores their enduring presence and rightful belonging.
208 pages, Hardcover
Expected publication March 17, 2026
5 people are currently reading
58 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
March 2, 2026
Tore All to Pieces nailed the people of EKY, our daily lives, and the ways we speak. What a testament to this place. It’s beautiful and heartbreaking and nuanced, and so smart! I love all the little ways the characters’ lives overlap. I knew those high school boys. I know Tammy. My mom is the school cook. I cried and laughed and I want to read it all again. Carver is one of the most brilliant and observant humans I know. I can’t recommend reading this book enough!
March 8, 2026
This is such a great collection! The combination of short stories and poems work so well.
February 19, 2026
Special thanks to NetGalley and University press of Kentucky.
Cue my incoherent rambling but this is one of the best books I have read that centers Appalachia. It is honest and doesn’t vilify, glorify, or infantilize the region. The cast of characters was unique and spoke to a broader portrayal of Appalachia. A good number of the stories were queer (and I’m having trouble putting this to words) but they were queer in a way that read true to life. So much of being queer is oftentimes thought to be synonymous with urban living, that queer culture is inherently urban. This book challenges that narrative, showing characters that would normally be written off by others (including some queer people) and portraying them both as uniquely their own while also making up a part of Appalachia.
On a more technical side, while definitely a choice to list out the names with a sentence description at the beginning of the book, I surprisingly liked it. It felt very much like moving to a small town and everyone speaking as if you know who they are talking about. This book encaptured the feeling of everyone around you knowing and talking about each other while you have to put the pieces together. I felt thrust into the story, and yet it lives on. Once closing the book I can imagine the people going about their lives and just continuing to live.
I can’t say enough good things about this book and highly recommend.
Cue my incoherent rambling but this is one of the best books I have read that centers Appalachia. It is honest and doesn’t vilify, glorify, or infantilize the region. The cast of characters was unique and spoke to a broader portrayal of Appalachia. A good number of the stories were queer (and I’m having trouble putting this to words) but they were queer in a way that read true to life. So much of being queer is oftentimes thought to be synonymous with urban living, that queer culture is inherently urban. This book challenges that narrative, showing characters that would normally be written off by others (including some queer people) and portraying them both as uniquely their own while also making up a part of Appalachia.
On a more technical side, while definitely a choice to list out the names with a sentence description at the beginning of the book, I surprisingly liked it. It felt very much like moving to a small town and everyone speaking as if you know who they are talking about. This book encaptured the feeling of everyone around you knowing and talking about each other while you have to put the pieces together. I felt thrust into the story, and yet it lives on. Once closing the book I can imagine the people going about their lives and just continuing to live.
I can’t say enough good things about this book and highly recommend.
February 9, 2026
Nothing Explodes — and That’s the Point
Tore All to Pieces is a patient, grounded debut set in rural Appalachia, built from episodes rather than a single driving storyline. The novel moves through work, family, faith and bodily survival with close attention to texture and voice. Churches, trailers, gas stations, back roads, cigarettes, guns and cars appear as facts of daily life rather than symbols. Poverty is practical. Religion is structural. Violence sits nearby, unromanticised and ordinary.
The book establishes its method early. Repetition matters. Scenes linger on routine, fatigue and care. Rayanne, who appears most consistently in the opening sections, anchors the tone through work shifts, food, television, and the physical management of daily life. She does not move toward transformation; instead, the novel allows recognition to replace development.
Alongside Rayanne, the book moves between other figures and moments: family histories, church spaces, men at work, neighbours and community memory. These characters do not form individual arcs so much as a social fabric the novel repeatedly returns to. Chapters such as “The Worthy” clarify how authority operates quietly through masculinity, labour and religion. Faith is not consoling or redemptive here; it is watchful, hierarchical and absorbed through habit rather than belief. These sections explain the silences elsewhere.
Queerness in Tore All to Pieces exists as one strand within this wider structure rather than as the book’s sole organising focus. It appears gradually, shaped by the same forces of class, geography and faith that govern everything else. Early moments register as memory and bodily recall rather than declaration. Desire is present before it is speakable.
The most sustained queer narrative emerges in the sections centred on Jamie and Nathan. Their relationship unfolds in distinct chapters rather than continuously, appearing, receding and returning as the novel shifts back to other lives and contexts. Their intimacy develops through proximity, routine and touch rather than confession. The restraint here is situational rather than aesthetic; fear and consequence remain close.
Chapters such as “Matching Tuxedos” make the stakes explicit. Brief visibility carries risk. The prom sequence captures the exhilaration of being seen and the speed with which that permission can be withdrawn. What follows is abrupt and believable. The novel does not offer rescue or narrative consolation in response.
Elsewhere, the book allows moments of humour and sharpness, particularly where sex, religion and class collide, without breaking its overall discipline. The prose stays attentive and tactile, though some sections linger longer than necessary, allowing repetition to press against momentum. Even so, the control of tone is striking for a debut.
It is a novel about formation: of self, of desire, of what survival looks like when expression carries consequence. Readers expecting a front-loaded LGBTQ narrative or a single central arc may find the structure quieter and more dispersed. Readers willing to follow its pace will find a book that understands its world and trusts the reader to notice what is happening without being told.
Thanks NetGalley and KY University Press for ARC
Tore All to Pieces is a patient, grounded debut set in rural Appalachia, built from episodes rather than a single driving storyline. The novel moves through work, family, faith and bodily survival with close attention to texture and voice. Churches, trailers, gas stations, back roads, cigarettes, guns and cars appear as facts of daily life rather than symbols. Poverty is practical. Religion is structural. Violence sits nearby, unromanticised and ordinary.
The book establishes its method early. Repetition matters. Scenes linger on routine, fatigue and care. Rayanne, who appears most consistently in the opening sections, anchors the tone through work shifts, food, television, and the physical management of daily life. She does not move toward transformation; instead, the novel allows recognition to replace development.
Alongside Rayanne, the book moves between other figures and moments: family histories, church spaces, men at work, neighbours and community memory. These characters do not form individual arcs so much as a social fabric the novel repeatedly returns to. Chapters such as “The Worthy” clarify how authority operates quietly through masculinity, labour and religion. Faith is not consoling or redemptive here; it is watchful, hierarchical and absorbed through habit rather than belief. These sections explain the silences elsewhere.
Queerness in Tore All to Pieces exists as one strand within this wider structure rather than as the book’s sole organising focus. It appears gradually, shaped by the same forces of class, geography and faith that govern everything else. Early moments register as memory and bodily recall rather than declaration. Desire is present before it is speakable.
The most sustained queer narrative emerges in the sections centred on Jamie and Nathan. Their relationship unfolds in distinct chapters rather than continuously, appearing, receding and returning as the novel shifts back to other lives and contexts. Their intimacy develops through proximity, routine and touch rather than confession. The restraint here is situational rather than aesthetic; fear and consequence remain close.
Chapters such as “Matching Tuxedos” make the stakes explicit. Brief visibility carries risk. The prom sequence captures the exhilaration of being seen and the speed with which that permission can be withdrawn. What follows is abrupt and believable. The novel does not offer rescue or narrative consolation in response.
Elsewhere, the book allows moments of humour and sharpness, particularly where sex, religion and class collide, without breaking its overall discipline. The prose stays attentive and tactile, though some sections linger longer than necessary, allowing repetition to press against momentum. Even so, the control of tone is striking for a debut.
It is a novel about formation: of self, of desire, of what survival looks like when expression carries consequence. Readers expecting a front-loaded LGBTQ narrative or a single central arc may find the structure quieter and more dispersed. Readers willing to follow its pace will find a book that understands its world and trusts the reader to notice what is happening without being told.
Thanks NetGalley and KY University Press for ARC
Review of advance copy
This felt like home. Which makes sense as the author was one of my high school teachers.
This collection paints a picture of small towns in Appalachia perfectly and every single character felt so real to me. Id read a full novel for every one of these characters. The gas station in the first chapter? Its as if he stuck the gas station i worked at when I was 19 directly into the book. This book is simply a work of art.
This collection paints a picture of small towns in Appalachia perfectly and every single character felt so real to me. Id read a full novel for every one of these characters. The gas station in the first chapter? Its as if he stuck the gas station i worked at when I was 19 directly into the book. This book is simply a work of art.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Tore All to Pieces is a beautifully heartbreaking, at times hilarious, and ultimately authentic plunge into the lives of contemporary Eastern Kentuckians, up the holler and into the mountains of Appalachia, deep into the complexity of Red State America, as only the author of Gay Poems for Red States could deliver.
The structure is fascinating, and it works brilliantly. Each short story is paired with a poem that serves as a hint, a key, a lens shaping the story that follows. Characters tear in and out of the action, one story’s protagonist reappearing as a side character in another. The pieces accumulate into something larger, a cohesive narrative stitched together as a fragmented novel, all of it crashing down into a dramatic conclusion.
Fans of Gay Poems for Red States will recognize familiar figures. Characters introduced in that collection -- the Lunch Lady in “Scientist,” Doug McCoy Jr. in “Ramen Noodles,” and the cashier in “Food Stamp Holiday Song” -- appear here with names, lives, and backstories woven together so that Carver’s Mosely, Kentucky feels as layered and real as any place south of the Mountain Parkway.
Dolly Parton’s Truvy, in Steel Magnolias, says, “Laughter through tears is my favorite emotion.” If you know what Truvy means, you already understand what Tore All to Pieces will do. It will tear you all to pieces, in the best possible way, a story of survival, belonging, resistance, and hope.
This work is unflinchingly sharp, deeply compassionate, and a powerfully raw love letter to a region that's (often) misunderstood, misrepresented, and underestimated by those outside it.
Willie brings you in, feeds you, loves you, punches you, and feeds you again before sending you back on your way.
Don't worry. He won't let you get lost, but he ain't gonna tell you which road to take home, neither.
The structure is fascinating, and it works brilliantly. Each short story is paired with a poem that serves as a hint, a key, a lens shaping the story that follows. Characters tear in and out of the action, one story’s protagonist reappearing as a side character in another. The pieces accumulate into something larger, a cohesive narrative stitched together as a fragmented novel, all of it crashing down into a dramatic conclusion.
Fans of Gay Poems for Red States will recognize familiar figures. Characters introduced in that collection -- the Lunch Lady in “Scientist,” Doug McCoy Jr. in “Ramen Noodles,” and the cashier in “Food Stamp Holiday Song” -- appear here with names, lives, and backstories woven together so that Carver’s Mosely, Kentucky feels as layered and real as any place south of the Mountain Parkway.
Dolly Parton’s Truvy, in Steel Magnolias, says, “Laughter through tears is my favorite emotion.” If you know what Truvy means, you already understand what Tore All to Pieces will do. It will tear you all to pieces, in the best possible way, a story of survival, belonging, resistance, and hope.
This work is unflinchingly sharp, deeply compassionate, and a powerfully raw love letter to a region that's (often) misunderstood, misrepresented, and underestimated by those outside it.
Willie brings you in, feeds you, loves you, punches you, and feeds you again before sending you back on your way.
Don't worry. He won't let you get lost, but he ain't gonna tell you which road to take home, neither.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews