Spoon Theory
Morgan DePue on how good memories, childhood trauma, and chronic pain can all rest in the hollow of that wooden spoon you hold in your hand.
Stories
Some Things, You Will Never Know
What we want to believe about our ancestors and what we believed as children pose questions that may never have answers.
By Andy Fogle /
Silent but Certain Agreement
A North Carolina poet fills her verses with memories and observations that flow from the present day back into the years passed and gone.
By Terri Kirby Erickson /
Pour My Breath Into You
In West Virginia, the state with the nation’s highest rate of death by overdose, faith communities answer urgent callings from any and all.
By Taylor Sisk /
The Widow, the House, the Porch and the Stars
A Kentucky poet explores who we are, the places we inhabit and the skies that shimmer above us.
By Emma Aprile /
The Saw and the Sawdust
He restored an old mountain cabin, wrote a sonnet to an old man and fell asleep, missing the sounds of the whippoorwill.
By Doug Cumming /
Tennessee Poems
She moved from the mountains of Germany’s Black Forest to the mountains of Tennessee. Her welcome there felt like divine intervention.
By Helga Kidder /
How to Pluck the Hell out of a Heart
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.
By Annie Woodford /
Seasons
When the bulldozers topple the trees and the owls and the field mice and the feral cats are gone, who will remember?
By Peggy Hammond /
Change of Heart
Three verses that take us from the gorges of western North Carolina to that mess on the front porch.
By Anne Waters Green /
The Songs We Say
Salvation South kicks off a month-long celebration of Southern poetry with a soaring essay from Annie Woodford.
By Chuck Reece /
The Hero Who Wanted to Die
Daniel Wallace’s brother-in-law was his hero. But in the journals he left behind, Wallace discovered the darkness that claimed his idol’s life.
By Chuck Reece and Photographs by Kate Medley /
The Coolest Guy in the World
Daniel Wallace interprets two pages from the revealing, long-lost journals of his brother-in-law, William Nealy.