The Poetry Editor’s Favorite Poems
Our poetry editor picks his favorite poems from Salvation South in 2024.
That Chuck Reece guy gives me the toughest jobs, but man, they sure are good ones.
This year, we published over 120 poems and I’ve had to winnow it down to five favorites. It’s a good idea, and I hope we can continue it—poets can always use a little extra love, it’s the time of year to reflect, and we get to celebrate what really moves us.
But, Lord, this is hard.
At the beginning of National Poetry Month last April, I said I wanted “to broaden and deepen the big choir that we are. I want to assure a variety of voices, a continuous river of poetry for readers to swim in. I believe the best poetry has an aesthetic energy and a social function. I believe in the magic of many, the awe of all.” I think we’ve done that all year long, and I think this quintet represents the whole choir.
A couple of these poems leaped to mind pretty quickly, but after that, I just decided to reread every one of this year’s poems and make a shortlist (which came to around twenty, if that’s short).
In terms of making choices, it was agonizing. In terms of just being a reader? What a pleasure.
William Carlos Williams once described a poem as “a small (or large) machine made of words.” They’re not mechanical in the rigid, predictable sense—poems, like people, have breath, heart, and an unconscious—but they are deliberately made, economically crafted things. Every word is weighed, every line break tuned. And yet these word machines can take us on vast journeys with surprising turns.
That’s the beauty of the genre, and I think that’s what every one of these poems embodies: craft and discovery. The poem, like the human, has a machine-like body, but it houses a soul.
I hope you get some pleasure out of these and keep on stopping by for poetry that celebrates, challenges, and surprises, that hunkers down and opens up.
Andy's Favorite Poems From 2024
Alphabetical by title
“Airing the Quilts” by Danita Dodson
This poem is perfect evidence that a lot of the best poetry is about the everyday lives of everyday people. But it takes the sonic and tactile sensitivity of a poet like Danita Dodson to make a poem like this soar. Listen to this poem’s often subtle music: the breathy alliteration of “hushed hills,” the long o’s of “woven slowly,” the m’s and short u’s of “hum,” “them,” and “sun.” And that’s just in the first four lines. The real heart comes right after that, how airing quilts is “our mountain ritual of coming clean, / telling the whole truth about who we were.” And quilts are perfect metaphors for a people anyway, right? The patchworks of fabric equal the patchworks of our lives and communities: scrappy, a little roughed-up, but woven together into a tapestry of color. It is thrift transformed into riches. It’s the sacred in the common.
Amen, Danita.
“Critical. Race. Theory.” by Jacqueline Allen Trimble
So much artifice, delusion, and deceit get broken down in Dr. Jacqueline Allen Trimble’s poetry, and they are replaced by wave upon wave of overwhelming clarity. Her poems stand firm, they strip down, they raise up. She has become one of the poets I turn to for perspective; when faced with controversies or social issues, I actually find myself wondering, “What would Jackie say about this?”
I do so precisely because of the sling-the-door-open nature of work like “Critical. Race. Theory,” a poem as formally brilliant as it is rhetorically incisive and spiritually brave. It takes each of the title’s three words and examines them as a dictionary might, with parts of speech, variations of definitions, and examples of the words’ use, but the poem also folds in dramatic scenes, interrogations, narrative, and history. Just check out this series of questions: “What does it mean to be white if whiteness has been used to bully everybody who is not white? Where did we get our money? Why does the National Anthem sing of shooting enslaved people as a good thing? Was that great grandpapa I saw in that awful picture?” A devastating and dynamic polemic against erasure.
“The Four Hundred Angels of Henry County” by Annie Woodford
I think of Annie Woodford as the Mother Maybelle Carter of poetry in Salvation South. Somewhere between the February 2023 interview with her, “A Beautiful Voice for Appalachia,” and her essay, “How to Pluck the Hell Out of a Heart,” two months later, the number, variety, and quality of our poetry submissions just soared. And we wouldn’t have had either of those pieces if it weren’t for her poetry itself, particularly poems like this one.
“The Four Hundred Angels of Henry County” is an ode to the holiness of her people’s county in south-central Virginia, the gifts of her parents and the gifts of the landscape. It opens with the lush natural world (“My first cradle was the moss inside / a stump, deep in a forest / where chestnuts still grew.”), and it ends with her father handing her a fishing rod to let her reel in a rainbow trout, and in between is a series of imagistic benedictions praising both the transient and the eternal.
“The Fires We Sing” by Ray McManus
Salvation South published the poems of Ray McManus very early in its life—a whopping collection of seven poems appearing in June 2022. Many of his poems use repetition—a deceptively difficult technique to use well, and one that has a surprising number of possible variations—but “The Fires We Sing” is downright astonishing. Ray’s rhythm, yearning, and determination all gel together. The poem feels almost as if it is literally breathing: it seems to swell, contract, dig, build, billow, spiral, swirl. There’s something vast and sweeping in it; it is the poetry of a searcher. It’s also got a gorgeous speech-like quality: charged-up, expansive, clear-eyed, aware of the dark and the light.
If you want to know what Walt Whitman would sound like if he were a firecracker of a preacher, just read this one aloud to yourself or to someone you care about.
“Home Is the Task You Remember Most” by Junious “Jay” Ward
I have to nerd out a bit about this poem’s formal qualities.
The first sentence goes for twenty-eight lines and has fifteen “if” clauses, which all take place in a kitchen, “the heart / of the home.” They begin innocently enough (“If you hate washing dishes, if you’ve always hated it, / if it was a form of punishment as a teen [...], if no one in your family pre-rinsed / their plates…”), but get progressively more complicated and conflicted. There’s the sadness of aging, there’s a “first whooping / from your dad,” there’s a divorce, all of it a gritty, glimmering illustration of “how a memory can / be joy and an earthquake at once.”
Finally, after those fifteen ifs, that first sentence gets to the fulfilling “then” clause. It begins, “then you know what / it means to accept,” invokes resurrection, and finishes with “it’s all joy.” The poem’s next two sentences are the poem’s last, and are a half-line each, bringing us back to the task of washing dishes: “Everything / to its compartment. You are waiting for the suds to rise.”
It’s a breathtaking journey that, like the best poems, rewards re-reading.
About the author
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.
- Andy Foglehttps://www.salvationsouth.com/author/andy-fogle/
- Andy Foglehttps://www.salvationsouth.com/author/andy-fogle/
- Andy Foglehttps://www.salvationsouth.com/author/andy-fogle/
- Andy Foglehttps://www.salvationsouth.com/author/andy-fogle/
