Pauletta Hansel's new collectanea, Understory , is a masterwork of history, genealogy, and whip-smart poetry--a literary investigation into the origins of her Appalachian lineage and, as a result, the origins of a huge slice of America as well. This is women's history at its finest. Starting with the migration of her tenth great-grandmother from England to Jamestown as a 'tobacco bride,' Hansel eloquently and with precision guides us through mountains, 'Flatalachia' and 'Swampalachia,' and presents us with generations of her feisty foremothers, each focused on the preservation of their offspring, especially their daughters, within a wildness of place and untoward ambitions. We've seen the movies, and each of us at some point has drawn around our flattened hands with a fat kindergarten crayon to make a Thanksgiving turkey in honor of the Pilgrims. This is not that. Hansel delivers hard facts and raw realities--'I come from women / their history / erased'--and this: the unfathomable likelihood that over 250 years later, Hansel is 'likely only the second woman in [her] lineage who [can] write more than a few words, the first being [her] mother.' And write she does--a can't-put-it-down 'weave of story under story,' the ending of which is yet to be determined.