"Mom's Canoe" is a chapbook of 24 poems rooted in the author's memories of growing up in the Allegheny Mountains in western Pennsylvania, an area of rich farmland and thickly wooded hills and valleys that was also the site of heavy coal mining and rail-roading activity in the last century. The eventual decline of those industries and the environmental and economic devastation left in their wake are important themes in this book, which also pays tribute to the enduring natural beauty of the region and to the strength, suffering, and joy of the people who have made their lives there.