No mother tongue is as rich as the Southern one. Our words are musical, and poetry expresses them with soul-shaking force. Annie Woodford celebrates the songs we say.

When the bulldozers topple the trees and the owls and the field mice and the feral cats are gone, who will remember?

Three verses that take us from the gorges of western North Carolina to that mess on the front porch.

Imagine you plopped a crazy 1950s New York School poet down into a 21st century Saturday night in Durham. It’d be dirty, you know, in that good way.

A Georgia poet moves furiously up and down our hills, into our winter winds and through the baskets of various apples laid out at picking time.

The Tennessee poet offers us verses about light and dark, smoke and mist, and riptides and droplets.

Regret, a Chattanooga poet argues, is like a junkyard.

Five Southern poems that smell like honeysuckle, mountain laurel, moss and tomatoes.

A poem about how a single word, in the mouths of Appalachians, can tell the world a great deal about how mountain folks see things.

A Tennessee poet brings us five works. All of them speak to small matters that every Southerner holds dear.

A poem about friendship and secrets in a country club locker room.

A poem about a Southern home — and why you might never leave it. Especially at Christmastime.