Diane Gilliam Fisher's 2004 award-winning book of poems, "Kettle Bottom," offers students a revealing vantage point for seeing Appalachian regional culture in a postcolonial context. An artful and accessible poetic sequence that was selected as the 2005 summer reading for entering students at Smith College, "Kettle Bottom" enables diverse students to reconsider their notions of Appalachia, and of regional identities, while also gaining a better understanding of postcolonial theory. In particular, Fisher's poems provide vivid examples that make Homi Bhabha's approach to postcolonial analysis not only relevant to the students themselves, but revelatory. In this article, Sheryl Stevenson demonstrates how combining concepts such as Bhabha's notion of hybridity with Mikhail Bakhtin's views on hybridization, polyglossia, and heteroglossia, and linking them to Fisher's poems can make these concepts come alive for students. "Kettle Bottom" portrays compelling events and clashing cultures of the 1920-1921 mine wars that were focused in Mingo County, West Virginia, with mining deaths and anti-union violence eventually drawing 9,000 or more miners into an armed uprising that was only quelled by national forces (Shogun 208). To see how the poems and theoretical concepts illuminate each other, Stevenson considers three types of hybridity in "Kettle Bottom."