Salvation South

Poets can see into and beyond the surfaces of things: a slumber party, the fraught present, a forest. South Carolina’s Ray McManus shows how it’s done.

The pandemic left communities in Eastern Kentucky fighting for survival and waiting on government responses that came too slowly, so Misty Skaggs turned to the ancient principle of mutual aid.

In the Editor’s Corner this week is Neema Avashia, writing about a new Salvation South series on Southerners who share their love for all God’s children in the loudest ways possible.

Music, mystery, and magic are everywhere: just ask this mystic Southern poet.

The last thing her conservative Carolina parents wanted was to see their daughter fight for civil rights. The music made her do it anyway.

Two by two they go into the ark of a soft summer night.

Coming from Louisiana and working in Germany, an anthropologist calls both places home—and so must reckon with two dark histories.

A posthumous collection of stories from Mississippi’s Brad Watson, who left a legacy of beautiful fiction, is just out. Alabama novelist Caleb Johnson, a student of Watson’s, has this remembrance.

Some things we can let go of. Other things we can stash in the bottom drawer. But the best things can stay in your heart forever.

Salvation South will be on vacation for a couple of weeks. Our next batch of new stories is set for July 21.

Cleaning insect innards off his mother’s windshield was this ecologist’s childhood chore of choice. Pesticides and climate change had mostly negated the need to scrape bugs—until the Great Southern Brood of cicadas descended this May.

From Georgia by way of Brooklyn, three poems weaving pleasure, wholeness, and spirits.