Molly Rice

Molly Rice has held several residencies teaching poetry, storytelling, theatre, film, and English as a Second Language in hundreds of schools, colleges, and organizations in North Carolina, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Russia, and Hungary. She has taught for seventeen years at St. Stephens High School where she is director of the Tractor Shed Theatre. She is an award-winning theatre educator and her theatre program’s civic engagement work with those who live on the margin has earned much praise. She has been published in various webzines and magazines including Fortnight Magazine, The Stinging Fly, Iodine Poetry Journal, and Bloodshot: Journal of Contemporary Culture. She was a contributor to a major anthology of poetry and art entitled, A Conversation Piece: Poetry & Art. She was published in Voices and Vision: A Collection of Writings By and About Empowered Women. Her chapbook Mill Hill was published by Finishing Line Press, Kentucky, in 2012. She resides with her husband and son, Adrian & Micah, in Hickory, North Carolina.

Christmas Town, USA

Under these lights,
Magic can happen.
Even Satan can turn into Santa.

His beard—not a tangled forest of shadow.
His boots—not kicking your ribs.
His belt with golden buckle not marking your body.
His suit—not a uniform marching to the boilers.
His “ho, ho, ho”—not a yelling curse.

Under these lights,
(450,000 red, white and green flame)
There is a glimmer of a smile.
Some warmth.

Pawn shop presents are not ticking time bombs.
Dogs are not hiding under the couch.
Singing is not told to shut up.
We are not made to eat in the kitchen alone.
Flinching is nowhere to be found.

But the moon hangs over us
And the blinking lights fade
Fear enters noisily caroling
That Christmas comes
Only once a year.

~ ~ ~

Praise for Forever Eighty-Eights

In Molly Rice’s Forever Eighty-Eights there are “no crystal stairs” in her southern mill hill childhood. Yet, the poet pushes onward following an urgent pulse, while unflinchingly calling forth ghosts, wounds, and secrets of the past. She bids them to come out of their hiding places, while she battles both hardships and heartbreaks. In this work, Molly reckons, but she also fathoms beauty and pays homage by uplifting people, places, and moments deeply rooted in North Carolina. With her forging she creates a throughway—each poem a stair to “reach landings and turn corners.” Rice ultimately casts her own light and in the glow we see her heart’s imprint on every page, which makes Forever Eighty-Eights a gift, a well-crafted offering resonating with a poet’s hard-won love.

—Glenis Redmond, author of The Listening Skin

Praise for Molly Rice

“I have breathed the dirt and lint / Like my parents did before me,” Molly Rice declares in these hard-eyed yet poignant poems of a mill village childhood. She has resurrected a lost world and vividly rendered it to her readers. Bravo!

—Ron Rash, author of Poems New and Selected

Molly Rice’s voice in Mill Hill cuts through the cliches of growing up amidst both poverty and beauty. She has a steady eye and a quick turn of phrasing and syntax. That quickening, through language that knows precisely how to spin itself into poetry and when to cut the threads the poem has spun, keeps each of these poems vibrating on the page, much as I remember my grandmother’s treadle sewing machine singing its rhythm of creation. 

—Kathryn Stripling Byer, Poet Laureate of North Carolina (2005-09)

In Mill Hill, poet Molly Rice recalls with great clarity, sometimes wistfully, both innocence and lost innocence, while deftly tackling the themes of family, loyalty, faith, and finally the irony and inherent ambiguity in growing up poor in a Western North Carolina industrial enclave known to the world as “Christmas Town, USA.”

—Tim Peeler, author of L2: A Poetry Novel