The Red Ahead: Poems

What if the lens we use to see monsters is the lens we're using to see ourselves? Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr. points that question directly at the most Appalachian and queer of cryptids —  Mothman — a creature born of night and dread, now caught in the everyday light of HR meetings, motel rooms, and mamaw's kitchen. With an unflinching eye on the blue-collar, the spiritual, the erotic, and the rural, Carver shapes these pages into a mirror until the monster we created looks back.

“The Red Ahead enchants. The fascinating balance between the fervor of myth and the conversation of lust and longing becomes a narrative unlike any voice I’ve ever encountered. I found myself yearning to understand more of what I know to be true and the eroticism of what I urged to experience. Red Ahead is a revelatory collection that pays homage to a gay icon who dares you to consider what we might discover about ourselves.”
—Ben Westlie, author of Run from Your Now (finalist, 2025 Minnesota Book Awards)

“Every where is some where, Willie Carver tells us. And all some wheres have their own sets of myths and monsters, those mirrors in which we see and know ourselves, the contour of our bodies, our fears, our hopes, and our desires. The Red Ahead opens with a brief poem and closes with its mirror. Not only are the reversals key to understanding the book, this literary inclusio forms a container inside which Willie breaks language and remakes myth to give us the inner life of the Mothman. But these aren’t persona poems promising to unlock and spill the secrets of some modern mystery cult. No. These are myth made flesh. Mothman is Carver and his lover, the boy who grows into his body, and also the Holy Ghost moving through these hills. These ultimately hopeful poems sit with pain and desire, and they ask us to be and accept the bodies we are.”
—Jeremy Paden, author of How to Recognize God’s Chosen

“It's magical. It reads like a lantern-lit scripture. Immersive and tactile and mythic.” —A.p. Harbor, author of Hum of a Dreaming Moon

“There is a price for self-revelation, Carver teaches us, and it begins and ends in Mothman’s arms. In The Red Ahead, a love affair reveals to us that desire is the engine which ‘whips [us] with . . .  scripture’ and teaches us to live in an often beautiful, often broken world. In a meditative romp which takes us from Motel 6, to the pulpit, to a LeAnn Rimes Concert and beyond, Carver, yet again, proves himself to be one the very best Appalachian voices writing today.”

—Sara Henning, author of Burn, Terra Incognita, and View From True North

Read Excerpts:

“What if We Butt?”