The Prose Editor’s Favorite Poems, and the Poetry Editor’s Favorite Prose
In a role reversal, Salvation South's poetry editor Andy Fogle and editor-in-chief Chuck Reece showcase their favorite prose and poetry pieces from 2024.
Herewith, we swap seats. Each of us picks our favorite pieces from our counterpart’s world.
Chuck’s Favorite Poems From 2024
Alphabetical by title
“Critical. Race. Theory.” by Jacqueline Allen Trimble
For quite a while, I’ve testified to my belief that Jacqueline Allen Trimble’s work is crucial, necessary reading for anyone who wishes to confront the hard truths of our region’s past. But that’s the dignified way I say what I believe. The sharper version is that Jackie Trimble swings the truth like it was a cast-iron skillet aimed at your ignorant head. One of the many feats she achieves in this monster of a poem is to show us the landscape of American truth and lies through the eyes of a little girl: “This little girl had been studying actual American history, written from research and receipts.... Facts and bodies missing for years or never acknowledged.... Naturally, she had some questions. Why would American citizens shoot and bomb Americans on American soil? Who would be jealous of someone else’s hard work and prosperity? Aren’t you always saying, Mama, that anyone can succeed in America with hard work? Her mother was becoming uncomfortable.” As you will, too, dear reader. Give this your attention.
“For Stephanie” by Connor Watkins-Xu
Depression and poverty are a dangerous mix. Watkins-Xu, an Alabaman now living in Seattle, covers a lifetime’s worth of trials in this almost epic poem about a woman who becomes a mother too early after fleeing from a childhood home scarred by abuse and alcoholism. Across three long stanzas, she looks desperately—from all the wrong people—for the love she never had in her youth. “For Stephanie” is a novel’s worth of hard living in fewer than a thousand words—loving words of the sort that can only be said from a distance.
“Gloaming” by Silas House
Silas House’s work spreads across decades of novels, poems, plays, and journalism. Between his relentless activism for the disenfranchised of Appalachia and his position as the current poet laureate of his home state, Kentucky, he has become one of the South’s most famous writers of poetry. Thus, we would have been—and still are—more than happy to publish his work. But we were particularly honored this year to publish a small collection of three grief poems. My favorite was “Gloaming.” To transform pain into beauty is one of writing’s toughest tasks, and few complete the job as well as House. Almost all the poem is scene-setting, as the “cool that often moves over the mountains in the evening” settles in. The reader becomes enraptured by tiny visions of “my people on their porches, living in the cool of the day.” And by the end, we are weeping for the loss of those people and their ways of life.
“I’m No Lady but I Am Still in the Lake” by Leia K. Bradley
I love smart, badass women, always have, from my Mama on down. Georgia-born Leia Bradley, now studying and teaching at Columbia University in New York City, embodies that ethos in her work. This poem, which we published in the summer, finds its narrator recovering from a divorce, presumably back home, somewhere in the Southern countryside. It begins this way: “I’m laying in the lake alone / gin-clean as any alcoholic housewife. / Divorcée, drunk / and naked in the local pond. Watch out!” The poem grows into a declaration of strength from a woman who is regaining power she had sacrificed to a wrong relationship. “I’m No Lady” feels—as least the way it rings in this reader’s ears—damned anthemic.
“When You Ask Me From Where My Help Comes” by Ashley M. Jones
Normally, in choosing my favorite pieces of nonfiction writing, I would be inclined to skip an interview presented primarily in Q&A format. But this conversation between two poets of monumental talent—Kentucky’s Frank X Walker, the founder of America’s longest running group of writers, the Affrilachian Poets, and Alabama’s Jacqueline Allen Trimble—is utterly captivating. Their explorations and revelations of African American history in the South begin from the poems of Walker’s latest collection, Load in Nine Times, which are based on his meticulous historical research into the lives of the U.S. Colored Troops, who fought for the United States in the Civil War. His book, Walker tells Trimble, is “about Black families and what we were doing as Black families—before the war, during the war, and after the war—to hold our families together.” That statement alone sent a chilling new understanding through my body. This discussion about the purposely hidden and wantonly overlooked truths of the Black experience in the South should be required reading.
Andy’s Favorite Prose From 2024
Alphabetical by title
“A Love Letter to a Drowned Land” by Grace Buckner
Every time I reread this dispatch from western North Carolina, I’m hit again with a kind of secondhand trauma. I’m blown away, once more, by what Hurricane Helene did to southern Appalachia, but I’m also instilled with hope, a renewed resolve, and maybe some defiant pride, too. As Buckner writes near the end, “if there is a group that can make it through a disaster that’s being called ‘biblical’ and ‘catastrophic,’ it is the people of southern Appalachia.”
While plenty of our stories delve into ongoing issues in the American South, they don’t typically respond to specific events that have happened in the past few days. Grace Buckner’s love letter is an inspiring exception, published just eight days after Hurricane Helene made landfall in the Big Bend region of Florida. And I mean “inspiring” in its oldest, most literal sense: a divine presence breathes truth into an artist, and that artist passes it on to us.
We owe Grace for that, and we owe it to anybody that suffered from that storm—or any such horror—to be like Grace: an observant, courageous, even raw witness. To not look away from darkness. To hold firm in giving love.
“Meet Me There” by M.O. Walsh
“The sick coward Simon lived on a weak little neck of the Tickfaw and we were to bring him the trouble.” That first sentence in this short story hooked, disturbed, and continues to haunt me. “Meet Me There” might be the darkest and most graphic thing we’ve ever published. In a lesser writer’s hands, those elements might amount to mere shock value, or serve only to make readers recoil. But M.O. Walsh is a magnificent writer, grounding this tale of vengeance for the molestation of children in something far more sustainable than violence or gore: the ambiguity of morality.
The question of how to respond to wrongs is rarely a simple one, especially when you ask it amidst complicated circumstances. The characters are complex—just like real people—and they struggle in surprising ways, going to the darkest of places. But that’s one of the things the imagination is for, and one of the most important functions of the arts: to take deep risks in relative safety. Think of it as exploring humanity’s interior universe: what wonders, horrors, mysteries will we find? Walsh shows us one version, and if, as we read, we can summon the courage to live with some real moral discomfort, we might actually be better for it.
“Shortchanged” by Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr.
Over the summer, I got to read Willie’s “novel-in-poems-and-short-stories” while it was in manuscript form, and I was a little nervous. I’m always a little tentative when a friend wants me to read their work–I worry that I won’t like it as much as their other stuff. Making it worse, Willie’s a beautiful guy, I love his poetry, and this is an ambitious project—so I really, really hoped it wouldn’t suck.
Sometimes I worry over the dumbest things.
That collection I read in manuscript—a Faulknerian undertaking of world-making, and done so with two genres—is now forthcoming from the University Press of Kentucky, and in September we got to run this story, Willie’s first fiction publication. In it, nearly fifty-year-old Tammy works at a Dollar Store, is just about to complete her associate’s degree, and has a good chance at landing a job with the local school district. “Today was the first real shot at a better life,” Willie writes, if only Tammy is willing to sign some “Moral Attestations,” one of which is to not even mention “alternative gender or sexual identities.”
Willie tells this story in a vivid and tactile way that I admire for its subtlety, clarity, and depth. I admire its quiet–there’s nothing intensely dramatic, just a hard-working, likeable, funny, everyday person in a realistic moral dilemma. Tammy is downtrodden, but dignified. I root for this woman, and I love her too.
“The Survival of the Community, Not of the Fittest” by Neema Avashia
Neema’s 2022 memoir Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place is another one I praise-cussed while reading it. And then, as a fellow Southerner living in the North, her essay “Fight from Away” spoke to me, and for me. And now she’s started the Love Louder series, the mission of which, in Neema’s words, is “to turn up the volume on love for the folks in our region who are fighting to make it a home for all of us.”
In the first piece in that series, Neema profiles Misty Skaggs, founder of Eastern Kentucky Mutual Aid, a group that started in the early days of COVID in a Facebook page “through which people could communicate that they had a need, and organizers could amplify that need and collect funds on their behalf, and then funds would get deposited into folks’ Venmo or Cash App accounts as soon as it came in. No need to go to an office to fill out paperwork and wait for it to be processed. No wait time between expressing a need and having it met. No shaming. No questioning of your integrity. Just express the need, whatever it is, and if it can be met, it will be met.” And people do seem to quickly and consistently rally. If you look at their Instagram posts, you’ll often see an urgent call for a hundred bucks to keep someone’s heat on and within a day a post announcing “Need Met!”
That ethic of care might be the most important message we have. Reading about Misty Skaggs puts me in awe of the depth of people’s common decency, makes me want to step up more, and makes me want to trumpet that ancient message of mutual aid from upstate New York where I live, down to Virginia Beach where I grew up, out to eastern Kentucky where Misty does her angelic hustling, and everywhere between and beyond. Here at Salvation South, we help stories get told. And stories help good get done. The people profiled in Neema’s Love Louder series are the proof.
“The Whole of the South” by Shawn Pitts
Shawn Pitts wrote one of the first stories I loved in these pages, a profile of folk artist Hattie Duncan, and I was immediately fascinated by Ms. Duncan’s story, her heart, and her art. That was October 2022, well before I started reading for Salvation South or became the poetry editor, but last August, we published Pitts’ profile of artist Ted Whisenhunt, and it’s another one that’s got me captivated. Whisenhunt is the kind of artist and person who defies categories, and by doing so embraces more: he’s a folk artist, a trained fine artist, a genre-crossing musician, a kayaker, a professor.
His recent exhibition “Watermarks: Reading Rivers of Southern Appalachia” turns found art and reclaimed objects into a “commingling of fancy and poignancy” about Southern waterways and the people using them. As Pitts writes, Whisenhunt’s “work argues that places leave indelible stamps on the people who inhabit them, if they care enough to scratch beneath the surface; that community informs creativity in tangible ways that can abolish cliches and get to the heart of who people are.” Check his stuff out immediately—especially “Dreamboat Wooden Canoe” as well as a canoe sculpture—and thank Shawn Pitts for pointing the way.
About the author
Chuck Reece is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Salvation South, the weekly web magazine you're reading right now. He was the founding editor of The Bitter Southerner. He grew up in the north Georgia mountains in a little town called Ellijay.
Andy Fogle is the poetry editor of Salvation South. He is the author of Mother Countries (forthcoming from Main Street Rag), Across From Now, and seven chapbooks of poetry, including Arc & Seam: Poems of Farouk Goweda, co-translated with Walid Abdallah. He’s from Virginia Beach, spent years in the D.C. area, and now lives with his family in upstate New York, teaching high school.
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Andy Foglehttps://www.salvationsouth.com/author/andy-fogle/
