Silas House’s The Tulip Poplars is a story of love between people that society says should not love each other. House, a poet and the author of Southernmost, traces the paths of four friends who call the Appalachian mountain town of Bright Star, Kentucky, home through much of the 20th century.
The four friends are teenagers Maeve, Amos, Tom and Paschal. Maeve’s father runs an orphanage in Bright Star, where both Amos and Paschal live; Paschal is the only Black child at the orphanage. Tom and Maeve are childhood friends, and Tom’s father has a tobacco farm where Tom and Amos work. Tending the fields side by side, they fall in love—despite Tom’s belief, informed by the “Holy Roller” church his mother attends, that love and sex between men is a sin. Meanwhile, Maeve falls in love with Paschal, but because Maeve is white and Paschal is Black, they have to fear even exchanging greetings publicly.
Soon, some of the four find themselves pushed beyond Bright Star. A threat from the Ku Klux Klan and the violent expulsion of the Black residents of nearby town Corbin by a white mob (an event which really happened) force Paschal to flee across the state to Lexington. Shortly after, Amos decides to make his way in New York City. As they mature and grow on separate paths, each of the young people has moments when their convictions are tried, and they must discover what they are willing to question and to sacrifice—their understanding of religion, their relationship to the land they grew up on, or honesty with those they love.
Throughout The Tulip Poplars, a grove of the titular trees serves as a gathering place and respite from the world. Once beloved by Tom’s father, the poplars—iconic to the beautiful Kentucky landscape—are tied to characters’ senses of ancestry and belonging.
This is a story of inherited values and the dissonance when one’s experiences chafe against them. The South, and the rural South in particular, is often flattened in stories. Here, the pain, beauty, danger and community of life in a small Southern town are all on full display. Amos, Tom, Paschal and Maeve find their voices as they fight for what matters—for the land, for their home and for their hearts.