When they went to my fatherto see if he wanted to raise his twelve-year-old son he couldn't pass the simple testof not having needles strewn all over the floor.The words are sometimes harsh and the visualizations raw, but so is reality for Jesse-Ray Lewis. He grew up in Appalachia surrounded by violence, drug dealing, and addiction.I held her for hours.There was foam at her mouth and blood as I cradled her.I am the one who closed her eyes.He entered foster care at age 12 and aged out of the system in 2016 at age 18. I thought, I want that.I want to live without walking from nowhere to nowhere.His poems rise up out of that shattered childhood as a quest for answers and a search for a new beginning. Hillbilly drug baby? Maybe that's who I came out as. But it's not who I want to be. In these poems, you see a young man on a precipice, wooed by drugs and forgetfulness, but longing for something bigger and better. I find a single droplet of hope and choke on it."e; Unafraid, he probes our deepest fears---what would it be like to live that life? To plumb the depths of hell?"e; - Saundra Kelley, author of Southern Appalachian Storytellers